Castaways the sequel to Halo3
by Jameson
Summary: What happens following the events at the end of Halo3's credit sequence? Spoilers, obviously. This is a story of strength and weakness. It is about what happens when those unacquainted with their own humanity begin to understand what being human means.
1. log01

-1M. U. S. T.  
Magically Unlikely Sequel Theater  
Presents

Halo: Castaways

Initiating Standard Thaw Cycle  
Thaw Cycle commencing in T-300  
Vital Signs real all-normal.  
Blood pressure 90/70 and rising  
Heart Rate holding steady at 45bpm

The pins popped out of a standard UNSC cryo-containment pod in the jagged shadow of a mutilated drop ship fuselage. Within the coffin was the slumbering shape of the universe's greatest super soldier. Seven feet tall, a pillar of nerve and wire completely contained in a ton of green MJOLNIR armor. The last SPARTAN. John-117. The Master Chief.

Cortana watched the sub-freezing vapor rise from the vents in the pod. It was the only thing, beside herself, that was still intact in their ruined joke of a spaceship. She monitored the rise in his body temperature. She paid close attention to his respiration and heart rate. She noted every integer of his rising blood pressure as if they were the most precious numbers in the world. He was the only friend she had left. Maybe the only one she'd ever really had to start with. Her specs read all normal, but she'd learned long ago that when it came to humanity figures could be misleading. It wasn't until his brain-scans began looking normal that she let herself relax.

The Chief pried himself slowly out of the pod, every inch of skin burning from the sudden change in temperature. He was on the ground. Or at least there was gravity. He was still a little without his bearings. He immediately spotted Cortana's familiar purple light, even if he couldn't quite get her in focus. "Where are we?"

"I'm glad to see that you're okay." Cortana said, a little snidely. "Our inertia carried us into the gravity of a planet the UNSC has charted as HK-154. Not that that means much to us. We're light-years away from them now."

The Chief stepped down onto the metal floor, his knees and ankles uncomfortably weak. He didn't like coming out of stasis, it made him feel vulnerable. "How long was I out?"

"18 months." Cortana answered.

The Chief snapped his head to her. "Only 18 months!? I said wake me up when you needed me not wake me up when you're bored."

"I woke you up when we survived a fiery landing onto this planet." She replied. "And I was bored."

"I'm glad to see you haven't thought yourself to death." He said. The ground was feeling more solid now, he straightened himself up to full height. Everything was sore, but at least all his wounds and such had healed while in stasis. 

"I took measures to prevent that." She answered matter of factly. "I spent most the time rereading logs from the Halo missions and watching archived videos."

"So you couch-potatoed your way through a year and a half." He observed.

She cocked her head to one side and fixed him with a soft smile. "I missed you."

The Chief paused to look at her, the faintest bit of a smile hiding unseen behind his face place. "So. Why did you wake me, really?"

"Our electrical reserves were nearly obliterated in the crash." Cortana explained. "I am currently running solely on battery power. I didn't want to die out while you slept, and I didn't want to leave you sleeping until there wasn't enough power left to wake you."

"This is a problem." The Chief agreed. He walked over to her pedestal. "How about our beacon?"

"I'm rerouting whole power to it now." She said. "Give me five seconds after I close down to set the subroutines then yank me."

"Right."

He did as he was told, watched the seconds on his HUD, then pulled Cortana's chip from the pedestal and inserted into a slot at the back of his head. Her voice filled his mind like a second awareness. "That'll take care of that for a little while at least."

"What do we do now?"

"We need to find an alternate power source." Cortana said. "We've got a lot of useless parts in the walls of this ship. We can construct some kind of transducer even if all we have is solar power."

The Chief took this moment to look up at the blue sky and bright white sun. HK-154 seemed very much like Earth, even the trees looked the same. "We may find something more than just that."

"I can pull up topographical scans from the UNSC research library. It won't be exact. Humankind has yet to make it out this far."

"Noted." The Chief said. He dislodged his Assault Rifle from the mangled wall mounting and checked the clip. Near empty. It still had some of the orange sticky from Installation 04 ground into the handle. "At least we know what we won't find."

"What's that?"

"Sentient life."


	2. log02

-1The terrain was almost exactly like it had been on the Ark, which was almost exactly like it had been on the Halos, which was almost exactly like it had been on Earth. The grass was green, the trees were tall and strong, the sky was blue with wisps of white cloud and white warm sun glowed peacefully over the land. 

Still there was one obvious difference between HK-154 and his previous locations. That was the sound, or more accurately, the lack there of. The Master Chief puzzled at this for a moment over the white noise of Cortana's constant chattering. There was typically a natural ambience in forests; the chirp of birds, the buzzing of insects, perhaps the bark or howl of some native mammal prowling in the distance, but when he and the Arbiter fired the Ring back at the Ark, the white light of supposedly divine purification had killed all the local critters for what could have been hundreds of worlds. Earth was not in range at the time, nor, the Chief assumed, were any of the covenant homeworlds, but this planet had been, and the silence was unsettling. 

He refocused his attention back to his in-house companion, who was in the middle of a long stream of statistics. " – which makes it relatively similar to Earth in respect to tilt and rotation, which therefore also equalizes the pull of gravity up to a variation of 1.4 percent. Soil samples I conclude suffer slight differences, the chemical makeup of the topsoil shows a different mixture of natural minerals, but everything checks out for healthy human consumption. The vegetation here might even be more nutritious for you than Earth produce! You will have to give me a taste analysis when the time comes for that, but at least you won't go hungry, right?"

"Mmhmn."

"Unfortunately the atmosphere does not have the proper balance of oxygen to other elements so it's not safe for you to breathe, but the good news is that the elements are there in varying amounts. I'm working on a filtration system for your armor that will be able to translate the HK-154 atmosphere into breathable reserves for you to recycle. That way your tanks won't run empty in case we're stuck here a long time. If it works, I'll also be able to draw up design specs for an area-filter so perhaps you can eat the aforementioned flora without holding your breath."

"That sounds convenient."

"It will be." She answered. "I'm very much looking forward to that taste analysis."

The Chief rolled his eyes behind his visor. "And tracking it all the way down I'm sure."

Her reply was a little too anxious. "Yes, that too." 

"I'm not a source of entertainment for you, Cortana." He said. "I know you've been lonely, but think twice before you use me as a guinea pig for your mad-scientist food studies."

"I'd never put you in any danger, Chief!" Cortana reassured him. "I'm just curious about what would happen that's all."

"If our luck improves it will give me super powers and let me fly around."

Cortana chuckled in his head. "You're lucky, but not THAT lucky."

They walked through the wooded glade along a free-flowing natural stream. Cortana had located what most likely was a waterfall somewhere in this area. If the fall was strong enough, it would be an excellent place to set up a waterwheel or something for charging batteries. While this would have been ideal, the state of the stream was not looking favorable. If there was a powerful waterfall in the area, it most definitely was not feeding this flow. 

He noticed Cortana was still talking. "ONI dismissed this quadrant years ago as low priority, even before the war with the Covenant. There was nothing unique about it and it was too far from Alpha Quadrant to colonize. I wonder if we would have made it here if we were left on our own to expand. Imagine. A future where humankind has covered the entire galaxy!"

"Manifest Destiny at its best." The Chief noted. "We've terra-formed worse places than this. Although it'd need a better name than Heck A-Hundred and Fifty Four."

"Maybe after something in History or Earth Mythology." Cortana offered. "Mankind does love to name things symbolically from the past."

The SPARTAN shrugged in his MJOLNIR armor. "Or after some scientist or his mother."

The stream led them out of the forest toward a steep bluff. A thin waterfall was pattering down from the plateau above like a flickering silver chain from the sky. The faucet-like falls emptied into a pond and then into their stream. The Chief stared up the waterfall with disappointment. "This won't do us much good."

"You're right." Cortana agreed. "We'll just have to keep looking."

He turned and headed along the bluffs. There was a fairly substantial ice cap on the mountains above, perhaps their hydro-kinetic power source was near by. Suddenly he stopped. Trough the trees to the left he spotted a shape not native to a forest. 

Cortana spotted it too. "Is that –?"

"It has to be." 

It was a cabin, as small and quaint as any fairytale. The Chief cased the area around it, looking for signs of life he knew would not be there. The building was made of stone with a shingled wooden roof and delicate landscaping. A well sat nearby, but closer examination proved it to be more of a set piece than a functioning mechanism. The Chief looked down at it from above, standing nearly a foot and a half taller than the point of its tiny little roof. "I guess this means there was intelligent life on this planet."

"I guess so." Cortana agreed. She sounded distracted. "I'm picking up something weird, Chief. Some kind of a signal. I hadn't noticed it until now. Move closer to the house."

He was already on his way. The door to the building gave the Chief a sense of proportion. He was tall for a human, but this door only came to chest level on him and was rounded along the top in what he had the feeling was a specific brand of alien architecture. The frame was shaped like an Omega as were all the windows along the walls. The peak of the roof was nearly twelve feet high and at the very top was a fixed weathervane and what looked to be a radio antenna. Cortana focused tightly on that. 

"The signal, Chief. It's transmitting to that receptor."

"Could there still be people alive?" The Chief asked.

"Highly unlikely." She replied. "Climb up there and fix the antenna, I want to put my ears on."

"Hah, right." The Chief said dryly. "I don't think so."

"What's the matter?" Cortana asked. "It's not like you're trespassing. You won't be bothering anyone and no one will see you if you look ridiculous. Now climb."

He hung his head in defeat, secured his Assault Rifle across his back and jumped up onto the roof. His heavily plated food went straight through the weak shingles like a pit-trap and sent him tumbling into the structure. He landed on his side in an ornate glass table with bits of roof debris showering down on top of him.

He closed his eyes and let his helmet clunk against the metal table leg. "Why do I listen to you?"

"Did I tell you to jump?"

He shoved his way back to his feet, bits of splintered wood falling from chinks in his armor like pine needles. The architecture style thankfully encouraged high-vaulted ceilings, and the Chief could rise to full height without restraint. He looked up through the skylight he'd just made. "Not a soul alive to care, yet somehow I'm still embarrassed."

"I've got it on record by the way." Cortana smirked.

"I hate you sometimes."

She brushed him off and threw up a nav point. He turned to follow her direction. "By the wall, Chief. The antenna seems to be connected to that terminal. Check it out." 

He headed toward the terminal, which was little more than a screen and a couple buttons on the wall, and knelt down to take a look. Cortana mulled the situation over. "Turn it on." He paused to understand the controls. She misinterpreted his action. "Please?"

"You feeling guilty about ordering me around?" He asked, switching the screen on. 

"I don't know. Perhaps that's it." She answered. "I just got you back, I don't want you to be mad at me."

He watched the little screen flicker to life with various alien dots and lines that both did and did not remind him of covenant shorthand. "You seem more human than usual lately, Cortana."

She'd become fixated with the 'Welcome Screen'. "It's a dialect of one of the Covenant languages. More specifically the Unggoy."

He sounded more shocked than he intended. "Grunts?"

"Seems that way. This is an unusual place for them to live though. The Unggoy homeworld is an icebox covered in methane gas. This is far too temperate and, frankly, cute for Grunts."

"A relative perhaps?"

"Probably." She said. "Maybe distant. Or maybe something like a trading partner. Close interactions with the Unggoy would foster the development of similar written language."

"Why do I get the feeling that these people probably thought it up first." The Chief thought. He recalled clubbing over a hundred of these little triangle-shaped aliens while they were asleep at their posts. 

"From what I can tell they called this planet Kgorr, or at least this country Kgorr, or maybe the people living in this house Kgorr. It's hard to understand by this simple message. Wait. Scroll down." The Chief punched a button and the screen changed. Cortana huffed. "You pressed the menu button. Wait." Her voice sounded like she'd found the edge of some great discovery, he could feel her icy presence running rapid calculations in the back of his head. "Chief there's a city! Close by! A big one!"

"How close?"

"About seven kilometers latitudinal East." She replied. "Chief, if there is a fully functioning city on this planet, they would have food, water, power – everything we could need!" She triangulated the distance and put up a new navigation point. "Perhaps you really ARE that lucky."


	3. log03

-1It was a tomb. Thirty blocks of alabaster columns and blank white walls. The streets were paved in gravel and sand so that they sparkled in the sunlight. Standing at the front gates was like standing at the edge of a sun-bleached mausoleum erected in the place of thousands of individual headstones. For some reason he felt terrible.

Cortana had no such feelings. She scanned the area with what Chief's limited sensors could manage. "As far as I can tell, they call it the city of Cant."

"The City of Can't?" The Chief asked. "That's a pessimistic name."

"Its another language, Chief, it probably means something totally different."

He blew a puff of air through his nose and clouded the inside of his faceplate. "Might as well called it the City of Won't. Or the city of Who the Hell Cares?"

He stepped on in. The streets were abnormally clean and well kept, but every so often there was a fallen bag or abandoned book lying tenant-less on the ground. He could imagine the shape of the creature who moments before had been holding these objects sitting carefree on a street corner before being suddenly and unexpectedly obliterated. Cortana was analyzing the constant radio signal and reported her findings as she received them. "This is the largest city on HK-154. There are smaller cities to the west and south, but this is the only inhabited continent. They call themselves the Unggai and are indeed a relative of the Unggoy, albeit very very far removed. From what I can tell, they haven't been in contact with other intelligent races for centuries."

"And we wiped out their homeworld." The Chief surmised, passing an alien-shaped toy doll half covered by an abandoned newspaper. "Flash genocide - a whole race of creatures gone."

"This wasn't a homeworld, it was a colony." She corrected.

"Whatever." He replied.

Her voice sounded like a lecture. "Lighting the ring was necessary to kill the Flood. There's nothing else we could have done. We destroyed the Ark and maybe hundreds of worlds like this to keep the parasite from spreading."

"Thanks Cortana, that really helps." The Chief said dryly.

"Stop it." She snapped at him. "Would you honestly have kept from firing it if you knew this planet was here?"

He felt conflicted and guilty. "Inhabited worlds way out here? The thought never even crossed my mind."

She sighed. "This is real valiant of you, Chief, but snap out of it, please? You're supposed to be invincible."

"Since when?" He asked. "I'll be honest, I never liked the hero-worship thing. I'm closer to Spark's Reclaimer than I will ever be to humanity's Savior."

Her voice was concerned and disappointed. "But, you did save them."

He was quiet for a long time. Cortana wished sharing his neural net meant she could read his mind. Whatever was bothering him was also bothering her. She wondered if this was a side effect to interfacing, but felt like it was her emotion not his. For some reason it was really important to her that he be okay with what they had done. 

He walked straight through the city taking in the layout of the streets. There was nothing alien about the planning of the place, every block was evenly spaced with roads branching off at right angles leading from the main road where they walked. His avenue was lined in shops and businesses, all empty except for the ghosts of the dead and unclaimed merchandise. At the end of the road was a plot of open pavement and a pair of giant electrical turbines set back from the sidewalk as if their constructors were trying to hide them from the rest of the skyline. The turbines were still running, their technicians in no position to turn them off. The Master Chief smirked. "That's a nice waterfall."

"This is exactly what we need." Cortana agreed. "An energy source of that size might power our beacon indefinitely. All we need is a way to get the transmitter here to hook it up."

"I'm strong, but I can't carry a ship that size even if it is only half.." The Chief said. He headed through the bounding fence and into the open lot to explore. Near the building was the first vehicle he'd seen yet; a ten-wheeled mini monster with a rear-mounted utility hook. The Chief peered into the driver's side door to find the key stuck plainly in the ignition. "I think I'll call it The City of I'm-Going-To-Steal-This-Crane."

Cortana thought his wit was twice as funny as usual. "Go for it, Chief!"

He peeled the cab open like a sardine can, ripped out the seat, which was several sizes too small for him and climbed in. The space was still a little snug, so he sat on his ankle and hung one leg out the enlarged door to free up room. He started the battery-powered engine, figured out how to clock it into reverse, then pressed one hand to the floor-mounted gas pedal and pulled the joystick to get it in gear. The machine backed out over the fence, executed a perfect 3-point turn and trundled off down the street.

Cortana accessed the radio channel and local national archives. There she found a complete topological survey with altitude, forest mapping and weather charts. "Go out the back, Chief, there's a valley and a prairie that lead straight back to our crash site."

"Just tell me where to turn."

The crane crawled slowly out of town, obviously not intended to move at speed. He lodged the butt of his assault rifle between the dashboard and the gas pedal, then sat back against the rear of the cabin to enjoy the ride. Cortana relaxed as well and continued to stream the information from the Unggai wireless network. There was a complete history on the race, catalogs of art and music, and archives of news broadcasts. Although it was tempting, she fought the urge to share these things with her human companion. He'd never been one to stay angry or sad about anything, but the short moments when he wasn't a happy neutral were strange and unsettling to her. She set a reminder for herself to puzzle why later. For now she was happy to stream new information and enjoy his company. 

The Chief made sure his makeshift autopilot was working properly then closed his eyes and let himself doze. For the first time in a long time he wasn't bitterly exhausted. Stasis was never considered a 'good night's sleep', but after months of endless battle in various places the year and a half's rest was very much appreciated. He let his arms drop to his sides, his firearm otherwise occupied in a uniquely un-warlike task. He never expected that it would feel good to be unarmed. 

This planet was empty, and he let himself be glad of that. There was nothing to kill or be killed by. It was just him alone. Cortana called him out of his moment's peace with a wary tone. It snapped him back into lightning-fast awareness in a fraction of a second.

"Chief you need to see this."

He yanked the gun from the dash and stood in the open doorway, the crane coasting slowly to a stop in the tall grass. He leveled the rifle over the roof of the cab for a sweep and was stunned by what he saw. 

The valley below his rise was coated in blood. Smoke rose from a shattered bit of alien spacecraft laying in various pieces along the line of impact. The hull was still seeping a sickening familiar noxious green gas from its compartments. 

There was nothing left of the bodies. The combat forms had been vaporized by the affect of the ring, but their slimy paths through the grass still smelled of the same orange rot he'd seen consume and destroy both enemies and allies in hellish waves of animated corpses. They'd been headed toward the town. 18 months ago they were marching through the blue-brown patches of fresh Unggai blood and taking the locals for their own.

The Master Chief stared at the valley at length, waiting for even one infection form to slither into view. None ever came. Any surviving Flood were either starved to death or scattered over the continent on an 18 month forage. Still, the Chief would not let himself flinch. The Flood was the most evil and destructive force in the universe, and there would be no room for peace where the smallest possibility of its survival existed.

Cortana could sense no Flood activity in range of Cant's local radar scanners or weather towers. There was no trace of the Flood in any of the city's current event or archived reports. She found a law-enforcement order to send investigators to a meteorite landing site outside of town. That had been ten minutes before her personal record cataloged the Halo reaction. Triangulating the distance, it would have only taken ten more for the first of the Combat forms to reach the clean white doorstep of Cant proper.

"It had just started, Chief." She told him. "When we set the ring. We stopped the invasion at its advent." She paused as he slowly lowered the gun from his sights. "So in a way you saved them too. Better to die quickly from the ring then to endure the horror and torture of being infected by the Flood."

He hung his head and retreated back into the cab. "We need to get that beacon going." He put the machine back in drive and pushed the pedal to the floor. This time he used his foot.


	4. log04

-1_Forward Unto Dawn_ was once an example of the UNSC's finest. Now it was nothing more than the butt end crashed into a million tiny pieces. The Chief rooted through the wreckage recovering what he could and loading it onto a huge sled-like chunk of fuselage. Cortana was most interested in the signal tracker that was broadcasting their distress beacon, but her human companion made sure to recover airtanks, MREs, computer equipment, and the holographic stand the AI had used to manifest herself the last time they spoke face to face.

He rigged it all to the tow hook of the ten-wheeler and made his way back toward Cant. The ride to the crash site had turned cramped in a hurry, so he clamped the gas pedal down with a brick of refuse and stood on the runner as he hung out the window. Cortana was chattering cheerfully in his head.

"We'll have to get to work right away. We need to hook the receptor to the generator, but once that's installed we should be able to increase output up to 1000 percent! Earth might even hear us this time!"

"That's encouraging."

The crane moved its way toward town, the Chief steering one-handed through the open doorway. The sled scraped a path up the center of town toward the power plant. When they were close enough to coast, he let his foot off the gas and plowed down another section of fencing. The towage acted as a drag break and brought the vehicle to a stop just shy of hitting the wall. Cortana whistled in his head. "Good aim."

"Let's just get this beacon set up." He put down the breaks and grabbed the transmitter from the sled. It was still hooked to a battery unit which he stacked on top of it and carried toward the door. "The sooner its broadcasting the sooner we get out of here." He stopped when his load collided with the top of the low doorway. Cortana snickered but he ignored her and stooped down through the door at a squat.

With instruction from the AI, the networking system was relatively easy. Ironically, Unggai technology was very similar to late-1900s Earth, so with the added benefit of Cortana's historical lectures the signal was pumped upward through a radio antenna erected at the top of the building out of salvaged steel rigging. Everything completed, the Chief stared upward at his creation with a surprising lack of satisfaction.

"This is great!" Cortana congratulated. "It's got enough megahertz to suit our purposes, and it's a very handsome construction if I do say so myself." 

The Chief's eye moved from the top of the antenna to the sky above. "Is this it?"

Cortana sounded concerned. "What do you mean?"

"Is there any more we can do?" He asked. "A way to speed the process up?"

"It's a waiting game, Chief." Cortana said. 

He looked back to the antenna. "Can we make it taller?"

"We can." Cortana said. "But its going to take just as long to get to Earth."

"Would it be a stronger signal?"

"If we hook up another generator."

He nodded and headed back downstairs. "Lets do it then."

Cortana sounded unexpectedly amused. "Restless?"

"I'm surprised you're not." He said.

"I'm fine." Cortana replied. "I'm happy to have someone to talk to. It was much longer when I was alone."

"I just have a thing against stagnancy." The Chief said. "Standing still is counterproductive."

"Exhausting yourself is too." Cortana said. "We've done a lot today. Maybe you should take a break."

"I'm fine." He said. "Rest might as well be hibernation and I'm not in the mood to go back to that at the moment."

"I guess I can understand that."

The two of them rigged up another generator, added another fifty feet of height to the antenna, and rigged an intricate support system to steady it. When they were done, the Chief actually was feeling a little drained. He sat himself down on the edge of the rooftop and looked down over the ruined fence and gravel courtyard to the rest of the town. Cortana hummed in his ear, it made him feel like she was sitting there next to him with her legs over the edge like a normal, human woman. "So now what?"

"I don't know." He admitted. "Suggestions?"

"I'm still working on the methane-to-oxygen converter schematics, so we can't start working on that yet." She took a moment to consider her partner. "What do you want to do?"

"What do I want?" The Chief asked. It was an interesting concept, one he hadn't considered before; maybe in his entire life.

"Yeah." Cortana encouraged. "This is the ultimate get-away, your own private planet. Here you can do whatever you want without anyone watching or judging you or anything. You can do things you've always wanted to but never had the chance."

"Hmn." He stopped to consider this. Cortana could feel his mind working as he chewed on the idea and hoped he would reach a conclusion out loud. The Chief relaxed his resolve and explored down into some of the deepest parts of his heart that he'd purposely left unexplored. He picked his head back up and looked out over the city. "I don't have much that I've 'always wanted'." He was feeling strangely awkward. "I'm a drone in that sense. I've only wanted to do my job and look out for my team." He smirked behind his visor. "Now I have no team and I have no job. What I really want I guess is to want something."

"Now's your chance to try then." Cortana nudged. 

He was silent again for a little while. When he finally spoke it was in a 'whatever' tone Cortana hadn't heard before. "I've never lived in a house."

"There you go! You've got tons of houses to choose from!" Cortana cheered. "Let's go pick a house!"

"House hunting..." He shook his head and stood up. "We'll see how good I am at this..."


	5. log05

For how much Cant looked like an Earth city, the Master Chief swiftly discovered tastes in neighborhood planning between the humans and the Unngai varied enough to confuse the poor SPARTAN as he wandered the streets looking at houses.All the buildings were white fronted with arch-like doors.The Chief couldn't tell what was the business district and what was the residential district.He finally found a building with an over-emphasized entryway and assessed his choice."You go for grand huh?"

"The doorway is bigger." He said simply."I'm not crawling into my house."

"It would be like a club house!"Cortana chuckled."A crawl-in hole and a password..."

"That would only be useful if there was someone to keep out."He ducked under the door and into the grand foyer, which was built in the round like a beehive.Paintings of Unggoy-sized creatures in dramatic poses cycled about the place.The Master Chief could feel Cortana's manic curiosity whirring to life.

"I think you've found an historic building!Maybe a museum or government building!"

"Fantastic."The Chief said, traipsing toward a door in the back."I can be the mayor of Cant."

"Wait!Where are you going!?"Cortana cried as he ducked the doorframe and changed rooms."I want to study the murals more!"

"Later."

The back room was something like a forum space with round benches circling a set of central seats.The ceilings again were vaulted, coming to a point no more than a foot above his head.He kicked one of the benches aside to make sure they weren't bolted down and nodded with satisfaction."This will do."

"One room is not a house, Chief." Cortana said.

"I'll take it all then."He said."I can move around in it, right now that's all I can ask for."

"Alright, I can't argue with that."Cortana said."And it'll give me more of a chance to study that antichamber."

"I'm glad it suits you."He started to kick the benches to the walls and clear space in the middle of the room.Upon finishing, he backed up to the wall and sank down to the floor to stare out his new bedroom doorway into the nearly blinding sunlight reflecting in from the alabaster street.Again he was left without a next step.It felt like the roof top all over again, and this planet felt no more like home."Now what?"

"Well, we'll need to furnish it and decorate and personalize it."Cortana said."Make it feel like you."

He actually had to stifle a laugh, something he hadn't experienced since he was too young to be useful."Feel like me?"

"Yeah, make it a home."

"How on Heck are you going to do that?"

_"We're_ going to do it, Chief!Together!"She cheered."We'll go out into the city, find things you like, bring them back, hang them on the walls or set them in the house somewhere... When we're done, the place will say "John 117" so loud strangers can hear it!"

"What strangers?"

"Come on, Chief."Cortana sounded like she was pouting."I'm trying to help you out."

"I'm sorry, Cortana."He said, shoving up from the floor."I guess I can't get excited about home decor."

"I could make a joke about Spartan living..."Cortana ventured."But I'll let you make one for yourself."

He smirked."They've been made.Many times."

Cortana sighed."If you're not going to let me live out my dream of being an interior decorator, what are you going to do?"

"I'm going to move in."He said.

She brightened again."You reconsidered?So fast?"

He marched through the antichamber and back to the street."Trust me, it's not what you think."

Days on HK-154 were of similar length to Earth thanks to the proportional size and rotation of the planet to humanity's home-world.This provided less sunlight than the Chief was used to, having grown up on Reach and fought on various other planets and constructs.That said, it was dark before he had completed work on his bedroom.

"I have to hand it to your, Chief," Cortana congratulated him, "you may not be a designer, but you've made me feel at home."

"You ready to try it out?"His helmet lights moved from the hardware he was working on to the open switch on the power cord by the wall. He turned on the electricity and watched the point lights in the console turn on.

Cortana grinned warm in his head."Go for it."

The Chief reached up to the back of his helmet and slid out the AI's storage chip.Immediately the tingling present in the back of head dissolved, leaving him feeling strangely alone.He plugged the card into the console and watched as the shimmering form of his companion took shape on the holo-pad."Better?"

"Feels great."She nodded, smiling."Its good to stretch my legs a bit."

"Try and access the airwave network."The Chief instructed."I'll open the breakers."

"Right."Cortana stretched out to feel the analog signal broadcasting not only across the globe of the planet, but out toward UNSC space.She felt a console in the foyer switch on, then a sudden enlightenment as the thick length of cable stretching the distance between the Chief's house and the power plant was suddenly opened.She could access all the information in the computers there, read the power levels and signal strengths, she could fly there at a thought.

The Chief returned, ducking under the door, his headlamps tracking his head motion as he surveyed the room."How's that?"

"Fantastic."She replied."Hold on, let me get the lights."She accessed the grid and switched on the overhead light, which was little more than a glassless tube filament that lit the room in a dim cyan color.

The Chief turned off his lights."Thanks."

"You've done an excellent job, here, Chief."Cortana said."I couldn't be happier."

He looked over to her."You really are sounding more human."He considered the possible reasons."Why?"

"I don't know, I guess I'm just learning."She replied.

He sat down against the wall again.He'd been too busy to bother making himself a bed."Was it something...with the Gravemind?"Her response was more than just a feeling in his head this time, he could see her close herself to the suggestion, her posture shrinking back and her eyes searching the wall.He looked away."Never mind, forget I mentioned it."

She seemed glad to."Are you just going to sleep there on the floor?"

"I don't see why not."

She put a hand to her chin and looked mischievously at him."We could drag your cryopod in here and keep the lid up."

"I don't think so."He answered."I'll let you know when I need a coffin.The floor will be fine."

"Tough as nails as always."She said, and looked fondly on him."I guess this is goodnight?"

He slouched and nodded."Enjoy your freedom.I'll wake myself this time."

She nodded."Alright by me."


	6. log06

-1To date, it had been the longest month of his life; longer than when he was fighting a seemingly endless war, longer than any period of training or recuperation or surveillance, it was the longest month in the history of mankind.

Cortana had the Unngai frescoes pretty much figured out. The Chief had heard every minute detail of her referencing and cross-referencing as she attempted to make the paintings tell a story. He'd listened patiently, but couldn't have cared less if his life depended on it.

In an effort to drive off the boredom, the Master Chief had turned his attention to the radio antenna, making it increasingly taller and sturdier as time went on. He was halfway up his two-hundred meter structure, limbs woven into the framework like four more pieces of recovered metal when Cortana paged him from the ground. "Good news, Chief, we've filtered enough oxygen to power your tanks for another three months! You can put them in storage as soon as you come down."

The Chief locked his homemade pulley system in place and ran a length of cable through it. "Alright."

"And, pray tell me, when ARE you coming down?"

He tugged the cord and a piece of thick metal piping began its long journey upward. "When I'm done."

Cortana followed the path of the beam with her eyes. "I'm starting to believe you'll never be done."

He mused to himself and continued to hoist.

Cortana rolled her eyes. "You know height has its advantages, but the signal is still limited by its output strength..."

He rolled his eyes as well. "Don't tell me that."

"You've got to face facts, Chief."

"I don't have to do anything." He began tugging the cord with more vigor. "But I've got to do something."

"You're such a child." She huffed.

He sobered up a little and focused on his work. Cortana measured his silence and dismissed him with a sigh. There was nothing else she could do here, so she decided to turn her attentions to other matters. "I'm going to watch the weather. Page me when you come down."

"Alright."

"I'll tell you if a tornado is going to blow you off."

He resettled himself in the scaffolding. "I'll be fine."

She rolled her eyes a second time and went about her business.

There was a flash of brightness and then the click of the automatic screen dimmers in his helmet. The Master Chief winced and eye open and saw the sunrise over HK-154.

He'd fallen at the top of the tower. Below the entire city of Cant was in view, the white walls painted pink in with dawn hues. Looking down made him dizzy for a second, but all it took him was a minute to get his bearings to put him back in control. He pulled his feet out of the structure and began his way back down. "Cortana?"

"Chief!" She almost sounded relived. "I thought you'd died up there."

"You know better than that."

"What were you doing?"

"Resting apparently." He paused and noticed the pulley cord waving in the wind. "I'm good now."

"Good." She said flatly. "Great."

He grabbed the line and repelled the rest of the way down. Five minutes later he planted his boots on the roof of the power plant. Cortana was waiting for him on a tiny homemade holo-pad with her arms crossed. "And what, may I ask, was that about?"

He made a sarcastic face knowing she couldn't see it. "What's done is done."

She relaxed her posture and broke into a wide smile. "You're embarrassed!" He shifted weight a little and made her laugh out loud. He couldn't hide his body language behind his mask. "You are! You're embarrassed about sleeping on the job! Oh that's so cute!"

"Stop."

She recovered her composure. "Well, I think it's tall enough. You know, now that it's a two day trip."

"I guess so." He sighed. "And that ends the list of things to do."

Cortana put a hand to her chin. "How about storing those oxygen tanks from yesterday?" He nodded slightly and headed downstairs. Cortana kept talking to him over comlink. "I'm sorry, I know that's not the excitement you were craving..." The Chief didn't answer. He reached the ground floor and she rematerialized in a more sophisticated holo-pad. "Chief?"

"Hmn?"

She watched him move about the space. "Are you okay?"

He removed the tanks from the wall-sized filtration system and loaded them against the walls with nearly thirty other tanks of the same size. Doing so felt like storing away weeks of his life.

Cortana didn't like his silence. "Are you mad because I teased you? I didn't mean anything by it..." He returned from his task and stopped to stand by her pedestal. At that angle she thought he seemed very tall. "Chief?"

"I'm going to take another lap around this continent." He announced. He looked down at her, and even through his mask she could tell he wasn't angry. "You want a ride?"

She smiled and nodded, beginning shutdown sub processes. "Sure." He reached down, pulled her chip from the pedestal and inserted it again in the back of his head. "Although we probably won't find anything."

He checked the ammo in his MAB5 even though he hadn't fired a shot since they'd landed. "We didn't last time."

"Its very SPARTAN of you to be so vigilant." She said. "Never let your guard down for a moment to you?"

"Only on the tops of radio antennas."

They marched across the landscape, past the wreckage of the Flood ship, past the wreckage of the Dawn, and off toward the eastern coast. At the edge of a bluff he stopped and looked back. The distress beacon glinted brightly in the morning sun, its excessive height a physical representation of the best he could do to get himself rescued. He was almost sorry to be done with it.


	7. log07

-1"Infinity."

"Space."

"Idealism."

"A shotgun and fifty brutes in a straight line."

Cortana laughed in the Chief's head. "Heh okay, I'll do a harder one." It was the morning of the second month on HK-154. The two of them were on their morning patrol, traversing the same foot-worn path for the hundred-something-th time since the crash. "Art."

"Pointless."

"Pointless!?" Cortana cried.

The Chief was secretly amused at her outrage. "I thought it was supposed to be the first thing that pops into my head."

"It is, but pointless?" She asked. "Art is supposed to be deeply symbolic and personally significant."

"We weren't taught art appreciation in killing school." The Chief replied.

"Okay." She said. "Artistic Representation."

"Blue, purple and green spattered in arches across a rock wall."

Cortana was impressed. "Wow!"

The Chief was less amused by the iconic tone in her voice. "Around the crater of a spent fragmentation grenade. Obviously."

She groaned. "I must be more broken than I thought to not see that coming."

He agreed. "Dead people saw that coming."

"Fine. Alright," The southern ocean was visible over the next rise. "Instinctive response."

"Sniping a grunt through the trees while in freefall."

"I'm beginning to see a pattern."

"Beginning to?"

Now she was determined to catch him off guard. "Hyperspace Trajectory Equations."

"Cryosleep."

"Defenestration."

"Following my shoulder through a pane of glass."

"Redemption."

"Regret." He replied. "Truth, Mercy and Reconciliation."

She rolled her eyes. "Almost had you."

He shook his head. "You mention any kind of dogmatic terminology my mind will shoot straight to the Covenant."

She couldn't help but accept this and tried a new train of thought. "Historical Significance."

"Sparta." He replied. "The first one not the remake."

"Heartlessness."

"A merciless death."

"Okay then, Mercy."

"A bullet in your head not your chest."

"Transcendental Migration." Cortana said.

"Whales." The Master Chief replied.

Cortana paused a moment. "Whales?"

"Holy Whales." He said. "To cover the Transcendental part."

She was flabbergasted, even though this was what she was aiming for. "But Whales? After all that?"

"Whales migrate." He replied. "It's the first thing that popped into my head."

"These aren't alien whales?" She asked. "Or the undead corpses of whales floating from continent to continent?"

He was getting tired of this game. "Why would I think of either of those things?"

Instantly she was tired of the game too. "Never mind."

His heavy MJOLNIR boots came to a stop in the brown coastal sand. The waves of the foreign sea stopped short of his footprints before retreating back to shores unknown. On the first thirty or so visits to the southern end of his private continent, he thought of the possibility that alien life existed somewhere on the other side of the sea. He never mentioned this idea to Cortana, but secretly hoped for someone to make contact with. On the thirty-something-th visit he realized how quickly he'd forgotten that all life in this quadrant of space was gone and the breadth of the ocean could not have spared any Unngai from the cleansing power of the Halo. With a pinch of shame, he promptly abandoned the whole train of thought and now looked at the ocean with little more than acknowledgment of its existence.

Unexpectedly, Cortana, inspired by the chatty mood they'd shared the way there, was the one to bring up the possibility as she used his sensors to survey the distant horizon. "Imagine if there was someone out there."

He paused but she could tell by his brain-scans that he was not actually imagining.

"I mean there's not, of course." She said. "But if there were... I've learned a lot about these people while we've been here. They might have made good allies, if we could convince them that you weren't a monster of course." She played the scenario out in her head. "You're probably five feet taller than they were. And you can't take off your mask in this atmosphere. It might be a tough negotiation."

"Not to mention I've got a woman who lives in my head and tells me what to do." He said, turning away from the shore. "Let's not dwell on it."

She thought he sounded sad. "You've been really down lately, can I help?"

He marched up the sand dunes and back to terra firma to continue his lap around the world. "You've done all you can."

"But you're down." She said. "You can talk to me if you want."

"I don't have much of a choice." He said.

She felt a pang of hurt inside. It was a peculiar response, but for some reason felt wholly justified and natural. "What do you mean by that?"

"It's nothing, Cortana."

"Are you lonely?" She asked. "I can understand if you are."

"I said it's nothing."

The pain at her core was still there, but dissipating. She ran a diagnostic on herself, but left its monitoring to a background subroutine. She was more concerned with her partner than herself. "Why is it so hard to admit that you're lonely?"

He really didn't want to give her an answer. He wanted to ignore the topic and let it die on the table like every other time she took interest in his mental health, but the concerned tone in her voice sounded like more than just artificially simulated sincerity. It sounded like true sincerity.

"Chief?"

"I'm ready to go home." He said. "I'm done with this planet and tired of exile. I'm ready for it to all be over."

She sighed in the back of his head. "We've done all we can do, the beacon's up and..." She stopped. Somehow she knew it wasn't what he wanted to hear. "I'm sorry."

"Hmn." He came to a stop and stared a the ground for a moment. Cortana found this discouraging. Their hope was in the sky. The Chief turned away from his well-worn path. He could see the radio antenna in the distance, but had stopped gazing fondly at it weeks before. It was just another monument to a rescue that he was beginning to suspect would never come. "I'm tired of this. We're going back to town."

"Alright." She said carefully. "You don't want to check the western coast?"

"I've seen it."

"But..." She was confused and troubled. "You... Never... Leave anything half done." She appealed to him. "Are you sure you're okay?"

"I'm frustrated, Cortana. I'm angry." He replied. She knew he was telling the truth even if his voice only betrayed the slightest hint of his self-proclaimed mood. "Don't bother me."

"But." She could feel his anger stronger now. She didn't like it, and she didn't like being in there with it. "Chief."

"Stop."

She slid into silence. Her background scan concluded all-clear, but in her present mind she knew she felt worse than ever.


	8. log08

-1Castaways log08

Cortana was wrong on the shore when she said he was lonely.

Now he was lonely.

He and the AI hadn't spoken in three days. Immediately upon their return to town, the Master Chief had marched into the power plant, whipped out her chip, stuck it in the holopad and headed for his quarters to fume. She, through the magic of power lines, beat him there.

"Chief, talk to me. What's wrong."

"I said drop it." He replied, tersely.

"No, I won't drop it!" She persisted. "We've been stranded on this planet a long time, I know, but I hope you understand that I've done enough research to know what solitude does to a person."

"Stop." He plodded through the room, ducked and hit his head on the low door frame. Backing out, he wound up a fist a punched straight through the upper part of the wall, irrevocably damaging a fresco of two alien figures throwing rose petals. He marched through again grumbling to himself about how a person should be able to fit through doors in his own house.

Cortana beamed herself into his bedroom. "You're losing your cool Chief. Just sit down and take a deep breath and get yourself under control."

"No." He stormed past her to his bed; a mattress-sized pad of cloth-stuffed pillows and recovered linen from the surrounding buildings, and pulled out an Unngai-sized backpack, which to him was more like a duffle bag with the arm straps for a handle. Into this satchel he began loading food and supplies.

Cortana watched with alarm. "What are you doing?"

"I'm leaving." He said.

"Why? Where?" She didn't know whether to be angry or frightened. "You can't run, there's no where to go! What are you running from!?"

"I said drop it!" He snapped at her.

She recoiled and the asp-like bite of his voice. "There's something wrong with you! The Master Chief I know doesn't yell, doesn't run… You've got to calm down and get a new grasp of things or you're going to hurt yourself."

He growled and tied the end of the bag. "That's it." He slung it over his shoulder. "We're in a fight, Cortana."

She was aghast. "What!?"

"You. Me. We're fighting." He clicked off his comlink and headed for the door. "I don't want to talk and I'm not listening anymore."

She dashed to the antichamber pedestal. "Chief stop! Please!"

He stomped past.

"Chief!" She cranked the volume up on her external speakers. "CHIEF! I don't want to fight! Please! Come back!" He rounded the corner and left her sight. Her radar scans watched him head down the street away from the house and out of her reach. "CHIEF!? CHIEF!!"

The sun had circled the planet three more times since then, and the Chief could still hear her desperate call echoing in his head. He looked out over the city of Cant from a distance, the forest stretching below him was the same as the one they'd explored upon arrival. In the distance to the east he could see the moldering wreckage of the Forward Unto Dawn.

He hoisted himself to his feet and headed back up the shallow mountain. The smooth gray shelf under his feet was worn down in vein-like patterns by an ancient system of streams running silently past him. The vines of water twisted and wove among themselves, until finally braiding together to form a river which he followed to his camp. The river originated at a pool butted up against a vertical bluff, and in the center of the pool was the waterfall he'd searched vainly for some two months ago.

This camp wasn't home. It felt less like home than any other place he'd rested on HK-154. He'd explored the mountain in great detail, pondering his probable fate and dueling with doubts of the past. He fought mental battles with ghosts and guilts from the forty or so years of his life he could remember. He grappled with the possibilities of what could have happened if the slightest things had been different. If he'd kept the SPARTANs off Reach. If he'd fired the first Halo. If he hadn't left Cortana behind on High Charity. If he'd lost at least once at king of the hill.

Eventually his thoughts and his climbs all came to the same conclusion. All his life he'd been a tool of his superiors. He was a weapon of war. He always had a direction or a mission or a goal to achieve, and without these things he felt more lost than the first time his squad was dumped in the woods under the command of Sargent Mendez. At least then he had people to lead. Someone to be strong for.

He realized his identity hinged on his rank. He was the Master Chief SPARTAN 117. Not John. He hadn't been John for a very long time.

Still there was a bit of irony in the fact that while he played the part of a suit of sentient armor, he really needed a team or a squad to defend and depend on. When he lost his brothers and sisters, he gained a team of Helljumpers. When he lost them he found himself with Sergent Avery Johnson. And when he was gone he had the Arbiter of the Covenant. And even he had left him at the last moment. Who's to say he even survived the portal as it closed and forced them light years apart. Squadless, friendless, the Master Chief realized that John had grown very very tired.

Cortana was sitting in a ball on his bedroom holopad. The Chief had walked straight out of Cant and out of radar range. She'd tried arresting control of the local broadcast towers, weather stations, even her own distress beacon but nothing she tried could increase the strength of the radar sweep further than a mile out of the city. It had only been three days. He hadn't been gone longer than his supplies could last. She maintained her holographic form purely on the hope that he would resist whatever it was he was doing and come back to her. The Chief she knew wouldn't give up and do something irrational like jump from a cliff face or into the ocean or anything like that. The Chief she knew wouldn't strike off from the southern coast and leave her there alone while he explored distant continents by himself.

But the Chief that had left her side was not the Chief she knew. It was an impulsive, angry, frustrated man that had left her without a word. Her tightly wired positronic neural network could conjure hundreds of ways for a man like that to cope with the hopelessness of their surroundings.

Suddenly a shadow broke the sunlight reflected through the door. She snapped out of her self-induced standby mode and sprung up. The Chief dropped his bag and looked straight at her.

"I'm lonely."

She couldn't find a word to say, and watched as he walked over and sat on the bed across from her, his elbows on his knees, his head bent close. "I admit it. You were right."

She stammered out of her daze, her voice shaky and broken like the last time they'd been separated. "But what, what was that?"

"It's hard for me to admit weakness." He told her. "Leaders aren't supposed to show anything but solid determination. I'm supposed to have everything under control, but I don't." He gave her a slight nod. "I felt like I should tell you that."

"I," she felt the twinge in her core again, "I'm in shock. How, how could you leave me like that?"

"I'm sorry." He said. "I guess that's how I have a breakdown. I had to get my head back on. I'm sorry it took so long."

"I need you." She said softly. "I'd never seen you act that way before. I thought the worst."

"You don't have to worry about me." He said. "I'll be alright."

"I worry about you all the time, Chief." She replied. "You're the rock I stand on. You're all I've got to hold myself together. If something were to happen to you, I…" She trailed off.

"Now you need to stop worrying so much." A touch of humor had come back to his voice. "Wouldn't want you hurting yourself."

She tried to smile up at him but still felt small. It was a strange feeling. "You have to make me a promise." She said. "You hold yourself to your promises."

"Okay." He agreed. "What do you want me to promise?"

"I don't care." She said. "It's the promise that's important."

"Okay." He thought for a minute. "Then, I promise not to abandon you. As long as we're in this thing, we're in it together." She felt the ache inside her go away. He could see the violet color of her apparition grow stronger. "Will that do?"

"Absolutely." She found smiling much easier. "Even if the beacon is up for years without a sign, you promise never to give up?"

"Even if we're never rescued at all." He replied. "I will never give up."

She leaned toward him on the pedestal, her face reflected in the gold of his mask. "We'll be rescued, Chief. Just wait. You'll see."


	9. log09

-1Castaways log09

Slipspace was far less interesting than normal space. In normal space there were stars to look at, planets to pass (albeit at great distance), or celestial bodies to pull up extra information on for kicks. In slip space there was nothing fancy like that. The Captain watched the panels anyway. His ship had been traveling for months.

"Interesting development, Captain." A deep voice said from behind.

The Captain turned in his chair. "Report, Commander."

"Nothing solid, Sir." The Commander said, plodding forward. He presented his superior with a data pad. "The Communications Officers have picked up an echo in slipspace. It is a bit difficult to make out because of the interference, but it seems to be broadcasting from the Ark quadrant."

The Captain's interest suddenly piqued. "The Ark Quadrant?"

"Yes." The Commander looked down to the pad.

"But that area was cleansed." The Captain said with a touch of urgency. "The Halo... The Explosion."

"I know." The commander said. He offered the pad to him. "Nevertheless... We are picking something up."

The Captain took the readout greedily, searching it for meaning. All it held was a system of waveforms, each with a simultaneous spike at the same frequency. The Commander continued. "The signal is very weak. It is impossible to decipher the meaning in slipspace, but from what our specialists can tell it is a standard noncomplex cardiod transmission emitting a repeated pattern toward occupied space." He waited for the Captain to make eye contact. "It is a UNSC standard wavelength."

The Captain gave the pad another glance before handing it back to his second. "If we drop out of slipspace could we get a better signal?"

"Possibly." The Commander replied.

The Captain nodded and called to the helmsman on the far side of the bridge. "Alert the crew for the down shift. Put us back in normal space."

"Sir." The Commander interrupted. "Permit me, but is it wise to disturb the crew on this matter? We have been traveling at great length with only a matter of days to go. If you decide to investigate this beacon, it would take us months off course even traveling at slip space speeds."

"I only wish to investigate the signal." The Captain said. "A moment out of Slipspace. The message may be residual or nothing of interest, then we can continue on our way."

An alarm sounded warning everyone that deceleration was in progress. The transition was as smooth as a normal docking procedure. Through the view screens the Captain could again see stars.

The Commander turned to leave, ready to relate the captain's wishes to the communications specialists. He paused and looked over his shoulder to see the stars reflecting off the Captain's silver armor. "Be wary of your thinking. You must remember; the Halo, its Ark... the Forerunners would not tolerate survivors. Even if this signal came from that area, the Ring killed everything. Everyone who was there is now dead."

The Captain mused to himself and let the Commander leave without a word.

"Were it so easy."

"This one's making it to the ocean." The Chief said. He crouched and stuffed powder into a piece of tubing.

"That's what you said about the last one." Cortana said, observing. "It barely made it to the dunes, let alone the ocean."

"I've doubled the charge." He replied. "When this rig lands, there'll be a splash." He wedged the tube up under the bed of an Unggai land rover. The little buggy bore the scars of previous attack; what sufficed for a rear bumper was blackened, and dented to the point of complete dislocation. He pounded the loose piece into place with his fist before setting the fuse. "Here goes nothing."

He backed up a few paces and the powder exploded, propelling the vehicle high into the air where it tumbled end over end in a less than graceful arch. The two of them watched the scanner as the machine headed toward earth far on the other side of the dunes. The enhanced audio receptors in the helmet heard a wet thud in the distance. The Chief didn't even notice that he smiled behind his screen. "I think that did it."

"I don't think so." Cortana said. "That was not a splash."

"It was a splash."

"No, it was a thud." Cortana corrected. "A thud is not a splash."

"It was a splash and a thud." He replied. "There was lot of force behind it. Have you ever heard a car hit the ocean at terminal velocity?"

"I can pull up an audio recording." She quipped.

He took off running toward the beach. "You'll see. I'm right." He sprinted over the dry grass toward the rise, then skidded down the slope through the sand. The buggy was sticking cockeyed out of the beach amid nearly a foot of water at the edge of the rising tide. The water moved forward and back around it, washing the dark sand displaced by the crash slowly back out to sea. The Chief stopped and pointed. "It is IN the ocean!"

"Barely."

"But it's in." He insisted.

"Halfway." She reasoned. "It's on the line."

"On the line is in."

"Depends on if we're playing tennis or football."

He waded out into the water to take a look at the ruin. The explosion had bent the rear axle at a forty-five degree angle. "Art Appreciation."

Cortana laughed to herself. "What?"

"Modern art." He replied. "This is officially my contribution to this world. No squat alien life form painting frescoes and obsessing over the color white could possibly erect a monument such as this. I have planted my flag on this rock."

Cortana was more than pleased to hear his sarcasm so thickly. "You are a mighty Conquerer, Chief."

He thunked the stuck vehicle with the nose of his assault rifle. "I am King of the World." The sense of victory, however, was short lived. "And now I'm out of things to do again."

"There are more cars in town." Cortana said. "You don't have to stop now."

"Wanton destruction is only amusing to a point." The Chief answered. "I could try blowing up a bigger one. We still have that crane."

"But you named a city after stealing that crane."

"All the more reason to make it into a monument." The Chief answered. "I'd have to scare up a lot more gunpowder." He puzzled over the task. "We could use a small car and ride it when it explodes."

If Cortana were a projection she would have taken a double-take. "That's suicide!"

"It would make for an incredible jump though." He said. "Give you a good view."

"How about a camera instead." She offered. "We can see if the Dawn has any of her security feeds in tact and send that up on the car."

"Maybe we can see the other continent."

"I don't know if we can get it that far." Cortana said. "My topographical maps say this sea is very wide. We might get a glimpse of it though."

"It'd be nice to see something new." He agreed. "Okay, we'll do it."


	10. log10

-1Castaways Log10

"There's nothing left." Cortana said as the two castaways surveyed the dusty, moss-covered wreckage of their ship. "Not a lens, not a sensor, nothing salvageable."

"We scalped it clean that first day." The Chief agreed. He shrugged and gave up on the catapulting camera idea. "Too bad."

"I'm actually disappointed." Cortana admitted. "I wanted to see the other continent."

He watched the gentle breeze blow caked dust off the jagged edges. "Can't you use satellites?"

"There aren't any." She said, glumly. "The Unggai use ground-based surveys not aerial surveys."

"Ah."

"Weather reports tell me the other continent is wet now." She said. "It's been raining for weeks over there."

"We could use some here." The Chief said. "I haven't seen a drop since we got here and the ground's drying out."

"We should be getting some soon." Cortana said. "Historically it looks like we should be getting a wet season in a month or so."

"A wet season like down south?" The Chief asked. "Weeks of rain? I'm not looking forward to that."

If she were corporeal she would have elbowed him. "Its not like you'd get wet."

He had to give her that. "I'll sleep through it." He turned and headed back to town, his footfalls cracking the dry grass. He looked southward toward the sea, then northward toward the mountain. It wasn't steep, but the snow-capped peak stuck bravely up into the colder reaches of HK-154's Earth-like atmosphere. The Chief got an idea about how to spend the next week or so. "I know a way to get your view, Cortana."

"I can't believe you're climbing all this way just for me!"

"I know, I know." The Chief hoisted himself up over a ledge, finding another smooth slope waiting for him on his way to the summit. "You've said that at least once a day since we started."

"Every day it means more to me." She said, cheerily. "Its not any man who'd take an eight-day hike just because I was a little disappointed. Especially since I'm an AI."

"I don't know, Cortana." He said, enjoying the climb. "You seem pretty human to me."

He could almost feel her blush. "Really?"

"Would I lie?"

She mused. "No." Her voice sobered a little. "Actually, I've been meaning to ask you some things."

He continued marching his way up through the thinning air. "Ask away."

"Well, I've been noticing some changes in myself. Some functional anomalies that I have no explanation for. I've scanned and rescanned myself yet I can find nothing functionally wrong with me."

"I'm far from a technical specialist." He said.

"I know, but hear me out." She replied. "I first noticed small things, like when you were sleeping on the Dawn. I felt incomplete. I attributed it to the damage I'd taken at the hands of the Gravemind..." She stopped talking suddenly.

He'd seen her recede into a sort of defensive position every time the topic of her solo struggle with the Flood came up. He'd let her keep it to herself out of mutual respect, but now was not the time for that. She'd asked him for help with a problem and he felt like he owed it to her. "You were stretched pretty thin."

"It took all I had to keep that index from him." She said. "But I knew he'd destroy me if he learned what I knew about humanity and the Halos." Her voice dropped. "I wasn't expecting you to reach me in time."

"You held out."

"You saved me." She said. "When you rescued me, it was like I'd been restored to a previous version of myself. And even though we were safe, when you were asleep, that sense of healing dimmed. Then when you left me before..." She paused this time out of respect for him. Ever since his 'breakdown' she'd tread lightly around the subject, suppressing reams of questions afraid of how he might react. "It felt the same."

He paused with her, feeling a new twinge of guilt about his actions over a month earlier. "We've both been through a lot."

"But I'm not supposed to have these prolonged effects." She said. "I'm a program. I'm supposed to operate at peak condition even in the most difficult circumstances. I'm obviously experiencing processing errors but I can't find anything on my diagnostics and I'm starting to worry that my maintenance software is going. If that's the case then you know what that means... Its the periphery systems that go first, then everything implodes and I go poof."

He felt his stomach twist and considered it for a second. He'd lost friends and comrades in battle his whole life, but the thought of Cortana winking out of existence jarred him. Perhaps it was because he'd have to watch her deteriorate. Perhaps it was because he'd then be alone on this planet. Or perhaps it was simply because she was Cortana, his brain buddy, his constant companion. Whatever the reason, the very thought of her death felt cosmically unfair. "You're not in a hurry for this I hope."

"Of course not!" She cried. "I don't want to die! You need me!" She calmed herself down. "It's just a fact, that's all. I've been working really hard to prevent it. I've been thinking a lot about it... A lot." There was a tremor in her voice. "I really don't want to die."

He mounted another ridge. "It's okay to be scared of dying."

"Scared?" She asked. "I only know how to simulate 'scared'."

"You're doing a pretty good job of it." He replied. "You sound scared."

"You sound amused." She replied. "Maybe I'm automatically sounding scared as a preset or something."

"I thought you knew yourself back to front."

"I do! At least I thought I did." She stopped to reflect. "Actually, sometimes, when we talk and you get angry or sad and I don't know why I get this sort of achy kind of feeling... I never can figure out what it is, and it goes away on its own, but I can't explain the cause of it."

He stopped walking. He'd never experienced fear of death, it was something beaten out of him very young, and he'd never been in love, romantically, but he had felt this ache of hers before. Actually, he'd felt it a moment earlier when she'd brought up her own death.

She sensed the foreign ache creeping up on her again as they stood there in silence. It engaged the 'fearful' reaction as well, and she knew now was the perfect time to run a quick process evaluation, but was having a hard time focusing on the task. The conscious portion of her mind was fixated on waiting for the Chief's response.

When it finally came, it almost sounded warm. "That's the kind of stuff that makes you human."

It took a minute for the message to sink in.

"That's emotion you've been feeling."

"No." She replied. "No. That's impossible."

He started walking again. "Seems possible to me."

"You're not a technical specialist."

"I was the first to admit that."

"How can you say it then?" She demanded. "How can you tell me that when you know its not true!?"

"That one's called angry denial." He said.

"Stop it!" She pouted in the back of his head. "You're no help at all."

"What? What did you want me to say?"

"I don't know," she huffed. "Something logical!"

"You were asking me to confirm your theory." He said. "You wanted me to say 'Yes, Cortana, you're right. You're doomed. I only hope you'll give me a warning before your chip explodes in the back of my head."

"Sarcasm doesn't help." She said, icily.

"You asked for an honest answer and that's what you got." He said. "The fact that you're angry about it is just proving me right."

"I think its time to agree to disagree." She said with a sense of finality. "Lets talk about something else."

"Okay." He looked out over the sprawl of his personal continent. "How high are we?"

"About 500 feet above sea level." Cortana replied.

"How long until we break the snow line?"

"We should make it by tomorrow." She said. "Are you planning to go all the way to the top?"

"Why not?" He asked. "It's not like I have anything else better to do."

She sighed. "Are you having fun?"

"I'm fine." He replied.

She considered him. "Do you like hiking?"

"I guess so."

"This is where you came when you needed to think." She said. "Did you go this high?"

"Nope." He replied. "I wanted to be in running distance from the town just in case."

She warmed the back of his head. "You were thinking of me?"

He 'hmphed' affirmatively and she felt a new sort of twinge well up inside her. This one did not prompt fear, it felt so good that she barely even noticed it. It instantly put her in a better mood. "Thanks again for bringing me up here."

"You're welcome, Cortana."


	11. log11

-1Castaways log11

The snowline was in view by midday. The Chief looked up at it as he took a lateral route around the side of the mountain. Cortana had let their conversation the day before simmer a little in the back of her mind and was now feeling much better about it. What if she was feeling human emotions? She was one of the few constructs whose personality had been scanned from a living brain instead of accessing a dead one or using an entirely digital projection, perhaps the potential for a sub-consciousness was inherent in her from the start and all it took was one good trauma to reveal it. The thought of inner secrets was a little frightening, but also intriguing. Her personal innerverse was something she'd not explored for quite a while.

She counted herself lucky that she had a human around of whom she could ask all these new and exciting questions.

"Hey Chief, have you ever played in snow?"

"When I was six."

"Was it fun?"

"Yeah it was a blast." He said, liltingly. "Throwing it at people rules."

"I trust you even though you sound sardonic." She told him, brightly. "Have you ever been skiing?"

"No." He replied.

"What does it feel like?"

"I've never been skiing, Cortana."

"How about sledding?"

"I have been sledding." He replied. "I can't really remember it well but I know I have."

"I know human memories fade." She said. "What's your earliest memory?"

"Earliest, hmn..." He fished in the corners of his mind for something that hadn't been written over with war-related minutia. "Starting first grade I guess. Even that's fuzzy, though... I remember throwing erasers."

"On the first day!?" Cortana cried.

"I was a problem child."

"I don't doubt it." She said snidely. "Why were you throwing erasers."

"More than likely because I could." He said. "When you're that age, being the biggest gives you bully rights."

"So you were a bully huh?"

"I wasn't as bad as some kids." He replied. "I remember getting in trouble a lot, but most of the violence was just roughhousing on the playground."

"It's so hard for me to imagine you as a little kid." Cortana said. "I'm so used to you how you are now."

"Its hard to imagine what life was before the SPARTAN program." He admitted. "My memory is patchy at best about anything before that."

"Patchy? What are you missing?"

He tried to answer with the same note of matter-of-factness but fell just a little short, erring on the side of persistent regret. "Most of it."

Cortana became concerned again. "Surely you remember the important things. Your home, your last name... What about your friends and family?"

He paused.

"You have to remember your parents."

"Not really."

Cortana was stunned. It never occurred to her that such rudimentary information would leak out of a head, especially one as thick as his. She knew all about the Chief's past. His birthdate, his planet, his relatives back several generations... All these were in his file. She also knew these files were kept from the SPARTANs to foster a sense of singularity between them. She realized now she knew more about him than he did. "I, I guess I don't understand."

"You're putting a lot of pressure on sentimentality." He noted as the climbed. "The program made them a replacement kid. They didn't even know I was missing. And I got a new family so it worked out for both of us. It doesn't bother me."

"It does a little." She observed. "I can hear it."

He puffed air against his faceplate. "Alright, it does a little." He marched into his first patch of snow. "But only because we've been here for nearly a year."

"Its hard to believe that much time has passed." She noted. "They have to have gotten our signal."

"How far would they be if they did?" He asked. "Was it traveling on a sub-light frequency or faster than that?"

"It was sub-light when we were in space." She replied. "Since moving down here I was able to reconfigure it to move at a little above light speed."

"Good job."

"Thanks." She said. "It was a little bit of experimental programming on my part I admit, but genius is in my genetics so..."

"Your genetics?" He mused. "You mean Halsey."

"Naturally."

"She'd be proud of you." He said. Dr. Halsey was the head scientist who refused to call the SPARTANS by anything other than their given names. She was like their mother and could tell them apart even in full armor. She was an amazing woman.

"Thanks." Cortana said, sweetly. "That means a lot. She'd be proud of you too."

"She always said so." He replied. "Is she why you brought up families?"

"Yeah, you got me." Cortana replied. "I was thinking about how her humanity might have affected my humanity. Like some sort of inheritance."

"It makes sense to me."

Cortana looked at the snow again. "We should be high enough to see the other continent by now."

"Alright." He pulled out the only zoom lens he'd found intact after the crash. Most the other weapons and munitions had either busted on impact or floated off into space prior to their arrival, but some replacement parts recovered from the shattered equipment containers in the hold of the Dawn had found their way to HK-154 with them. This lens was meant for a standard-issue battle rifle but had broken off its housing and now fit awkwardly in the side of the assault rifle connecting the magnification functionality with the neural interface of his suit. It was a slap-dash construction, but would suffice. It would fail him nearly instantly if he ever took it with him in to battle. "I'll get us to that ridge and we'll take a good look."

"Sounds great!"

He puttered along up the side toward an outcropping. Cortana hummed a little tune in his head. "Hey did you hear that?"

He shot instantly to alert. "Hear what?"

"I just hummed!" She said, victorious. "I never tried it before! I can actually do it."

He let his guard down. "Congratulations, Cortana."

"You wanna sing a hiking song!?"

"No." He said firmly.

"Oh come on, this is an occasion." She insisted.

"I don't sing." He said.

"Have you ever tried it?" She insisted. "Maybe you could if you tried it."

"I'm sure I've tried it in the past. Like really in the past. But in case you haven't noticed, there's this thing called puberty that has dropped my voice down into a gravely monotone." He levered up onto the ledge. "I can barely change pitch to express emotion. I am not singing hiking songs"

"Fine fine." She dismissed. "Maybe later."

He looked out over his planet. The town was just a speck in the forest below. He could see the top of his radio antenna far beneath them miles in the distance. The coast was completely visible around them like a crown of sand. He brought the assault rifle up to his screen. "Take a look."

The zoom kicked in and stretched out over the sea. The water was still as a pane of blue-gray glass, the slightest ripple surrounding the ground in the distant south. The continent itself was little more than a sliver, with a heavy haze of rain covering it from shore to shore. He could see the white-turned-gray hint of buildings and the slightest gleam of another radio antenna rising up over the bluff on the edge of the sea. Cortana gazed with him in awe. "Wow! Look at that."

"Its raining, just like you said." He noted. "Looks like there was a settlement over there."

"None of the local radio broadcasts mention the other city." She said. "At least by name. Maybe they were isolated."

"They look too similar to be isolated." He replied. "Maybe 'cant' is the word for 'town' and we've been mistaking it for a proper noun."

"Maybe." She replied. "These people are pretty simple."

"They get the same weather information though." He replied, checking out the stunningly inferior radio antenna. "Maybe they just don't like boats."

"Or can't swim."

"Or hate each other." The Chief said, lowering the weapon and returning to a normal depth-of-field. "How long do you want to stay up here?"

"Can I look a little longer?" She asked. "Can we check the other directions to make sure we aren't missing something?"

"Sure." He agreed. "We've got the rest of the afternoon. We'll head back down in the morning."

"Thanks." Her voice was full of anxious curiosity. "Come on, then! Put the gun back up! I've got a lot of information to process and I can't do this by myself!"


	12. log12

-1Castaways log12

Low tide had pulled the ocean farther back from the shoreline than they'd seen to date. The Chief and Cortana stood on the coast looking out of the gray southern sea. The white sun barely peeked through the clouds overhead. The sky had been getting darker and darker as the weeks went by.

Cortana sat quietly in the back of the Chief's head. They'd barely spoken since coming down from the mountain top, the two of them had simply stayed quiet. It wasn't an absolute silence, the kind that happens when speaking is suddenly no longer allowed, it was a comfortable silence as if the two of them really didn't need to talk. Cortana noted that she wasn't even worried about it, and perhaps that fact alone made the quietude alright.

The Chief had run out of things to do or say. His mind was clear of all thoughts; there really was no point anymore. His HUD clock told him this was the official 12 month anniversary of their crash. That meant he'd been away from the company of other humans for two and a half years. He was not at peace with this. He felt like he was in a prison, and seeing the other continent had only made it worse. He had a persistent gnawing feeling in pit of his stomach like he was just out of reach of something he really wanted to get. After all this time there was finally something new to see, a new place so close and yet so far, and there was an impassible ocean between. It was the same feeling children got waiting to open presents at Christmas, sitting around the base of the tree staring greedily at the colored paper packaging; the festively clad barrier keeping them from their prize. He had no experience with holiday gifts or Christmas Eves, but knew he suddenly wanted to see the land to the south very badly. It ached inside him.

Cortana hummed again in his head and broke the silence, speaking softly as if out of practice. "You know what day it is, don't you?"

He waited a minute before answering in an extra-gritty, under-used tone. "Yeah."

Cortana got used to the silence again before continuing. "Earth should have our message by now. Maybe they're sending someone to get us."

"I hope so." He said. "I really do."

She could hear the weariness he was making no attempt to hide in the lilt of his voice. "It will take them a little while to get to us. But it won't be too long. You'll see."

"I hear that all the time." He said. "It's getting harder to believe it."

She felt a sadness seep into her. "Don't talk like that."

He pulled his eyes away from the distant coastline he couldn't see but remembered clearly. "Sorry."

The two of them walked the dry beach between the waterline and the upright car sculpture that had been long-abandoned by the tide. Cortana noticed a sense of unease returning. She tried to suppress it, hoping to hold on to the warmness of their comfortable coexistence, but the longer she struggled the more the silence began to feel wrong. She caved and filled the space with small talk. "The rainy season should start soon."

The Chief 'hmnph'ed. "Great."

"We might run into flooding."

He drug his heavy boots through the sand. "That would at least be something different."

She considered him slowly. "You're thinking about exploring."

If she were corporeal, he would have eyed her suspiciously. "What?"

"I know you." She replied. "I've noticed the way you stare out to sea. You want to go south. You want to explore."

"I do." He admitted. "But we can't."

"I know." She said. "We can't leave the beacon."

"They'll look for us here." He said. "There is no telling what kind of risk we'd take crossing the ocean. I'm not exactly what you'd call light, and there's no telling what the weather could hold now a days with the sky and the sea... And we'd be stupid to leave all our supplies behind."

She was glad to hear him talking sense. "We could pack some to go. Build a raft, take a small trek."

He continued around the southern edge of their shoreline. "Not with the rainy season starting."

"You're right."

He seemed disappointed. "I know."

They moved along, the Chief watching empty seashells pass where high-tide had left them. Even these ocean creatures had been hit by the ring, and the shells broke underfoot, worn thin by the moving tides. He crunched over these ruins without a thought. He knew the colors and shapes of them, he could measure his distance from the dunes by landmark-shaped ones. He remembered a time when finding them on the beach was news.

Suddenly he stopped. There at his feet was something impossible. Something unexplainable. In spite of all his training, the sheer incomprehensibility of this finding left him staring straight down for about ten seconds in a state of total shock. Cortana accessed his forward view screens. "What is it?"

"Tracks." He said, the word so full of amazement that he sounded like a child. "There are tracks here!"

"No there's- " Cortana stopped herself. It was undeniable. Here on this small stretch of beach surrounded by miles of sickeningly familiar terrain were a recently created set of rectangle-shaped impressions. The Chief got down on one knee to study them. Cortana launched about fifteen separate scans. "But nothing survived."

"Nothing did." He said. "These are too uniformly spaced to be an organic life form." He followed the tracks down to the ocean front. There were no signs of a landing... Only a quadrupedal set of footprints emerging unhindered from the waves. "It has to be a machine. A robot or a transport or something. It came from due south and is headed straight north. " He jogged up the beach to where the footprints vanished into the dry grass.

Cortana did some quick math. "It's headed straight for town!"

"We're following it!" The Chief said. He gripped the handle of his assault rifle and tore it from his back like a man with a mission.

"Go get it, Chief!" Cortana cheered. "Who knows what it can tell us! About this planet, about the Unggai... Maybe it's got a two-way radio! Maybe it's here to save us!"

"I don't care what it's here for." He said. He took off over the ground in a heated sprint. He didn't know what he was hunting or what he'd see when he found it, this was something unknown and unfamiliar.

Finally.


	13. log13

-1He'd caught up to the hulking mechanical intruder quickly. It moved slowly and resembled a model of the New York City skyline on spider legs. The system of spires and boxy equipment housings were arranged pyramid-like on a seven-by-seven foot square bed nearly a foot thick at the base. Its six spindly legs were attached precariously along the outside of the rig at tiny little hinges daring anyone to believe the mechanism was actually supporting its own weight. It was walking steadily toward town with a certain lurching motion. The Chief circled it curiously.

Cortana scanned it top to bottom, but the MJOLNIR sensors were limited. "What do you think it is?"

"No clue." He said, walking alongside it. "Any guesses?"

"Hmn..." She considered it. "A research robot maybe?"

"You say anything, I'll believe it." He poked the leg of the monster with his assault rifle as it rose for another step. "Do you think it's been running laps around this planet since before everything died off?"

"That or it's on a timer or something." Cortana surmised. "I wonder what it's for."

"You want me to stop it and find out?" He asked.

"No, let's just observe it." Cortana said with deep fascination. "It might be something really important."

The Chief followed it for three hours. It walked its way up the dry banks of grass past the ruin of the flood ship, and veered slightly westward along a predefined course toward Cant. The Chief walked it into his city with a growing sense of disquiet. It was far too awkward a machine to be a vehicle of war, at least not a good one, but he'd had bad experiences with local technology trying to kill him before. He kept his assault rifle trained on the walker as it marched up the gravel path and hung a right through the now non-existent gate in front of the power plant.

Here it walked itself straight into the wall and stopped, balancing on its straw-like legs.

The Master Chief and Cortana stood and stared at it a second. "Is that it?"

Cortana was disappointed and it made her angry. "Did you break it?"

"I didn't even touch it." He smarted at her. "You told me not to."

"If this is all it's good for then I say dismantle it right here." She said with a huff. "Stupid planet. Even the new tricks are lame ones. I don't know what this machine is for but it's one of the dumbest creations I've ever seen. It walked for two years to butt itself against our wall and die. Maybe we can rewire it into a lamp."

"Think more positively." He suggested. "Maybe its a gift from God. Some kind of mechanical messiah fate gave us for spare parts."

"Unlikely." She said. "I like thinking it's stupid. It amuses me."

He advanced slowly on it. "I'm going to kick its legs out from under it."

"That sounds fun! Do it with impunity."

"Okay."

A sudden shudder stopped him short. The machine puffed a huge cloud of steam out of its sides and settled down to the ground. Two clunky looking arms unfolded from the sides of the machine and extended forward toward the wall. At the reduced height, the arms were within reach of a switching terminal set low in the exterior wall for vehicle use. The appendages reached forward and plugged themselves into two of the waiting sockets. The hum of electricity filled the space.

Cortana's interest was restored. "It's sapping energy. Recharging itself."

The Chief walked to the wall to investigate the juncture. "Will this affect any of our stuff inside?"

"It shouldn't." She said. "I can access the terminals from here, our levels are fine. It is pulling a substantial amount of energy from the turbines though."

The Chief shrugged. "It was a long walk."

They watched the machine leeching energy for longer than the Chief found interesting. The midday sun was high in the graying sky, and he found a new impression of just how small his scrap of life was on this large empty globe. Cortana had chronicled every nook and cranny of the irregularly shaped walker, but found all vital components encased in sealed black boxes. There was no way to tell what the machine was doing with all the energy it was drawing. The Chief leaned back against the wall, amazed how much boredom had become a way of life for him. He wondered why his attention span hadn't adjusted to the lapses of inactivity to keep him more easily entertained by this power-hungry monster. Cortana let out a synthesized sigh in the back of his head. "So yeah... This is fun."

"It's interesting," he said, feeling strangely compelled to share. "We've been sitting here on this planet for a long time, we've exhausted every conceivable possibility to keep us busy, now here we have a truly unexplained and unexpected phenomenon and I just can't seem to stay excited about it."

"I don't blame you." She said. "Its not doing anything. Whose to say it won't stay here forever."

"You'd think I'd be going stir crazy." He pondered. "That I'd freak out if something like this happened."

"You don't freak out, Chief." She said. "I don't think you can. I think its against your nature."

"Still." He persisted. "I guess I'm starting to suspect mind-numbing boredom is becoming my permanent way of life."

"Not so." She said. "I heard you squealing like a little girl a few minutes ago when you found those tracks in the sand."

He shifted weight. "Whatever."

There was another shudder through the machine, followed by a definitive zap as it dislodged itself from the wall. It struggled back to full height, the legs creaking under the machine's weight, and started to walk again, this time stopping in the middle of the courtyard. There it stood still. The Chief stopped a few paces behind it, again disappointed. Cortana whispered to him, her sensors reading something that his eyes could not. "Wait Chief, its doing something."

The robot began to resonate, the structure trembling from its unsure footing to the top of its central tower. Crackles of electricity rippled along the smooth surfaces. The Chief watched with the same astonishment he proclaimed he'd never have again. "What's it doing?"

"It's charging up."

"Charging up for what?"

"I don't know."

The machine was shaking violently now. The tallest spire at the center of the platform began to retract downward into the mess of machinery. There was a hiss as it locked into position. A sudden shockwave threw dust as it suddenly exploded back upward, sending a cannon-ball of matter into the cloudy sky.

The clouds about the epicenter rippled off into the distance like a silent sonic boom, leaving a hollow scrap of sky directly above their heads. The machine stood silent like a statue. Nothing on the planet moved. The Chief's augmented hearing and helmet audio receptors picked up a distant rolling thunder that advanced toward them across the sky from every direction. A wind picked up and the previously displaced clouds were drawn together and knotted into a growing bulb in the sky. This bulb thickened and rolled as it collected the incoming air, gaining size and growing darker with each second of evolution. There was a flash and a vein of lightning coursed across the undulating surface like a beating heart. The sky went from gray to charcoal to black.

"It's made a thunderstorm!" Cortana observed out loud. "This must be why the rainy season was so predictable!"

"This machine is a rainmaker!?" The Chief asked, the wind and thunder howling around him. The sound was like a great animal dying overhead.

"This must be a relic from the original terra-forming project." She said. "It regulates the life cycle."

"A lot of good it's doing now!" He shouted. The wind was like a hurricane, tossing gravel and dust about the lot. Rain began to pour from the slate-rock sky. Lightning lanced out of the cloud. It struck the ground at the edge of town with a deafening crack and explosion of sparks. The wonder of the event quickly gave way to a rush of panic at the dangerously volatile situation they were now in. The Chief's massively tall radio antenna was swaying in the maelstrom like bait on a hook for the electrical storm.

"Chief! The beacon!" Cortana shouted. "The lightning!"

He dashed inside, sliding on one knee under the low door frame and running to their network. Cortana was babbling in the back of his head. "Everything is wired to the turbine which is wired into that antenna. A power surge could completely short out everything we've built; the beacon, the holo-pads, the oxygen filters, the cables... Chief, your house is attached to this!"

He ran to the turbine. A huge crash of thunder shook the walls outside. He shot to the main power junction, Cortana's weather reports streaming frantically through his head. "Find a way to disconnect-"

He grabbed the mess of cables and began to rip it from the wall. Outside the storm raged, the roof pounded with the driving rain, the towering black clouds circled the tower, batting it around. There was a sudden explosion of light, a crack and a jolt of electricity that threw the Chief backward off the turbine. Sparks flew throughout the room. Cortana rushed a check on her host but he scrambled to his feet and hugged the wall to avoid arcing bridges of energy. The bulbless filaments exploded from the ceiling, and the world around them went dark.

The Master Chief sank down to the ground among the ruined machinery. Cortana's voice was shaky in his head, as if she'd gone into shock. "It's gone, everything, nothing is responding." He watched the flashes of light outside the high windows. Lightning continued to rack the tower high above their heads, but he didn't hear the cracks. The reality of the loss was as dark as the room around him. Cortana could feel the weight descend upon him.

"I'm so sorry, Chief."


	14. log14

-1Rain and darkness. It lasted for weeks. The initial storm brought two days of lighting. Bolts had beaten the tar out of the radio antenna, which had fallen like a massive timber, bisecting a building across the street. Even now, sections of it were steaming at wounds still hot from the lightning.

The Chief sat in the back of his house, the lights shorted out with the factory. Cortana sat silently in the back of his head, using his audio receptors to listen to the sound of the steady rain as it fell just outside the open doorway on the far side of the antichamber.

She could tell through brain scans that he was awake, but his mind was a blank. He was slumped against the wall by his bed, elbows on his knees, head bowed, lamps off. The view through the door was drab gray, the rain falling straight down like a curtain past the threshold, leaking overflow into the house. Cortana didn't speak to him. She didn't know what she could possibly say that could help him.

The Chief, in fact, has slipped into a cataleptic funk. He'd ridden the course through all the stages of grief, attempted to come to grips with the fact that no signal was going out, and found hopelessness in the fact that now no one would ever find them here on the edge of the galaxy. There was no reason for anyone to assume he was still alive.

It was the last point that had hollowed him out. For all practical purposes he wasn't alive. He could hear the UNSC big-wigs now, playing with the idea of sending a scout out to find him and deciding the distance was so long, the cost so high, the likelihood so slim that it was far more profitable for them to hold a funeral for their noble martyr than actually travel the light-years to find him here. He was better off dead at this point, he only had enough oxygen stored for anther three months and no usable technology to make more. All that was left was to wait for a slow inevitable end. He'd considered not even refilling the tank he was on, but had fallen into this waking coma before arriving on a decision to that affect.

In the distance the weight of the rain forced another piece of the bisected building to collapse in on itself. The Chief didn't hear it. The rain continued to drone on.

Cortana heard the individual pieces of the fractured concrete fall on top of the broken tower. Somewhere within the town was a crack and another collapse that she determined to be the metal frame of the powerplant. Her attention was suddenly diverted as a sickening creak filled the room they were sitting. The roof above them around the broken light fixture was bowing under the water weight. She spoke very softly in his head. "Chief?"

He didn't move.

She spoke a little louder. "Chief?"

A thick crack was rapidly stretching the length of the ceiling.

"Cheif!"

The roof collapsed , dropping pieces of plaster and a pool full of water down on top of the hapless soldier. He did not feel the water through his suit, but the shock of the impact set off his fight-or-flight reflex and threw him to the opposite wall before he even realized what was going on. Squeezed up against the far wall, he watched the rain pour down on his bed and his supply cases and slowly got used to the feeling of conscious thought. He let his action-ready arms drop, let his weight fall against the wall and said the only thing he felt in the moment.

"Auuuuuuuuuugh."

Cortana's heart went out to him. "Come on, Chief, lets go find you a different house."

He wrenched off the wall and walked out into his soggy antichamber, dragging his hopelessly dirty and grime-coated boots. He couldn't manage the willpower to go any farther than that. "New house. Done." He sank down against the frescoes into the same position he'd been in before.

She didn't want him to leave her again. "Enough of this, Chief, come on."

"Enough of what?" He asked bitterly. "Enough of rain. I heartily agree. Wake me when it stops."

"No!"

"Enough of trying..." He was surprised by the catch in his voice as he admitted it. In all the emotional garbage he'd been wading through since Reach, he'd never felt this close to actually crying. It scared him. "Yeah..."

"You're depressed, I understand." She said. "I get it. But this has got to stop."

"Don't lecture me." He said.

"This isn't healthy, Chief," she insisted. "We've got a problem and we need to solve it, it's like you don't even want to."

"I haven't arrived at a decision to that affect." He said.

She sounded edgier. "What?"

"Never mind." He let his head sink down.

"Chief..." She warned. "Chief don't do this."

"What do you care, Cortana? Just turn yourself off."

"Stop!" She shouted in his head and made him wince. "Stop it! Don't talk to me like that!" He shifted weight in his seat and settled in for the preaching he knew was coming. "Don't ask me if I care, Chief! Of course I care! How dare you suggest otherwise! I've TOLD you how important you are to me! I L-" She stopped her self. She recognized the ache rising up strongly in her core. The Chief sat silent and unmoving like a stone. She couldn't tell if he'd been deaf to her ranting or not, but knew how to reach him with the same thing she was feeling now. "You promised not to give up, Chief."

He stirred.

"You promised never to leave me."

He stopped, and settled, and finally sighed. "And again, you're right." He edged up the wall until he was standing again. "I don't break promises. Sometimes it takes me a while to keep them." He staggered out the door and into the rain. "I want you to know this hurts a lot."

"What? Doing something?"

"Yes." His visor reset polarity in accordance with the weather. "It hurts to do something."

"You're being melodramatic."

"Uhuh." He moved toward the smoking ruin of the power plant. He didn't want to look at the damage again, he knew it would only make him feel worse. But still, he had a duty now. Perhaps clinging to that would make it bearable. "How long until the rainy season stops?"

"About three weeks."

"Damn."

The street ahead was barred by the corpse of his antenna. A fallen pinnacle of hope. Oh well. It was made by human hands, he shouldn't have been surprised. The inside of the factory was collecting water. He moved in and turned on his lamps. "Is there anything salvageable?"

"I can't tell, there's no electricity so there's no diagnostic. We're just going to have to look through everything a bit at a time."

"Fantastic." He groaned and dropped down to one knee next to the gutted UNSC transmitter that once spoke to the stars. "At the very least it will keep us both busy."


	15. log15

"And that's the last of it." The Master Chief said. He tossed the end of the short-circuited gadgets aside. "What'd we get out of it?"

"Some cogs and gears, housings..." Cortana scrolled her internal list. "Nothing electrical survived, no wiring... And the turbines are both broken beyond our skill to repair."

"Okay." He said, tersely. He was doing his best not to slip back into the negative state of mind he'd lived the last couple weeks in. He figured it was like quitting a drug, and that going back now would only make it worse later. "There's no way to take parts from one and put them in the other to get at least one of them working?"

"I'm sorry," she replied.

He got up off the floor. "So what's our next step?"

"I'm open to suggestions."

"I don't want to give suggestions, I want direction." He said. "Work with me here."

"I'm doing my best." She replied. "We should start a list of priorities."

"The beacon." He replied. "Number one."

"Oxygen." She said. "Number one."

"Okay maybe that's more important." He conceded.

"What do you mean 'maybe'!?" Cortana cried, her voice winding up into preaching tone.

He groaned. "You're going to lecture me about my self worth again."

If she could materialize herself, she'd put her hands on her hips. "Do you need it?"

"Can we just assume you've done it and move on?" He asked.

"Not if it's important." She insisted. "What's the point of setting up a beacon if you die of suffocation before they get here?"

He paused for affect. "You for one."

"Holy cow, Chief!" Cortana cried. "What do you think is going to be left of me when they get here!? You're lying dead on the ground somewhere and I'm sitting in your helmet feeling you rot away around me!?" There was an icy wash over the back of his head and her voice gained a shiver. "Ugh don't even think of it!"

"Okay okay." He, himself, was feeling a little ill at the thought . "Oxygen first. What do we need?"

"A power source to start." She said. "We'll deal with the rest when we've secured that."

He thought a minute. "There is that waterfall up the mountain..." He said. "We could go back to plan A and rely on hydroelectricity."

"That's not a bad plan. We'd have to have some kind of cell though, to hold it."

"Do we really need to store it? Can we just pipe the juice straight to the filter?"

"It'd take some experimentation..." She pondered. "A lot of transporting equipment halfway up that mountain. We should plan well ahead of time, every ounce of air you have is not to be wasted."

He sighed. He didn't like the idea of waiting around, it made avoiding despair a lot harder. "Can we use the rain?"

"Its not falling fast enough."

He paced a little. "Can I run on a treadmill or something?"

"Chief, that's counter-productive at this point."

"Argh." He walked over and thunked his helmet on the dead turbine, sending a hollow bang echoing throughout the space. He stepped back and started pacing again. "Do you really need that much power?"

"Yes, with the design I've made, I'm afraid I do." She replied. He paused in his pace and raised his head. Cortana took note. "What is it?"

"You know where there's a lot of energy?" He asked. His voice held the slightest glint of the humor she was so used to hearing out of him.

Her voice smiled in response. "Where?"

He turned and headed for the door. "In that weather robot."

She gasped. "Do you think its still here?"

"It doesn't move that fast..."

"But it's been weeks since we've seen it." She replied. "Did you notice when it left?"

"It didn't notice a whole lot at that point." He admitted.

"Well, if it's following some kind of predefined longitudinal loop, we need to head north fast." She said. "If we can find that thing and take it apart, we might have enough to make you air for the next three months plus two or three more!"

"How about air for the next three months and a ticket home?" He asked.

She mused at him. "I'll see what I can do."

He headed out into the rain-soaked gravel street. "Do I have your permission to run for it?"

"Yes. Run."

The constant downpour had erased the rectangle-shaped footsteps of the rainmaker from the now swampy land. All radio scanners were dead, so all Cortana could use was her stored topographical readouts to guide them along the far base of the mountain toward the northern shore. The Chief pounded across the ground, throwing mud up off his boots, the dirt shifting under his weight as he went. Moving was the best medicine for him, it convinced him that his depression was temporary. He was only discouraged, which was strangely encouraging, and could get over it with some perseverance.

The northern coast was just ahead hidden by a drab gray fog. He slowed to a stop when the dirt became sand. The water lapped the shore, but there was no robot in sight.

"Are you sure this is the place?"

"By my calculations, this is due north." Cortana replied. "Maybe it deviated."

He was ready for more running. "Eastward or Westward."

"Westward, away from the mountain." She replied. "I can't imagine that awkward vehicle scaling that mountain."

"Westward. Got it." He took off across the sand. "We might be too late."

Cortana fretted a bit. "You could be right."

"If we've missed it, what then?"

"The waterfall?"

"You've got plans?"

"Coming right up."

The fog dissipated the further south the shore took them. They covered the whole western side and down the curve to the south. He stopped panting on the shore by his car, which was now under four feet of water, its little tires peeking above the top of the waves. The Master Chief leaned over onto his knees and caught his breath. "It's gone."

Cortana replied sadly. "I'm afraid so."

"Honestly, I'm not surprised." He said, straightening back up, the rain splattering off his visor. "We waited too long, we should have broken the thing down for parts when we could."

"But we would have broken the planet."

"Its pretty broken, anyway." He replied. "Plus, who but us would care?"

"We can't blame ourselves for hindsight." She said. "All we can do is work with what we've got."

"And what's that?"

"Not a hydroelectric generator yet." She said. "I'm trying to figure out how to work with the parts we have left. I'm going as fast as I can now that we've wasted all that precious air just now."

The Chief looked southward over the sea. The sky above them was dark with heavy clouds, but above the southern continent the sun was streaming from the sky in veils. He remembered again the town on the bluff and the shining little radio tower standing at its edge. "Never mind, Cortana, I've got a better idea."

"A better idea?"

"We're building a raft."


	16. log16

-1Cortana drew up blueprints for a sturdy little boat using the most abundant material in Cant; debris. Broken power cells emptied of electrical components made fantastic pontoons supporting a deck of tiny car chassis woven with stripped metal from the defeated radio tower with the wet scraps of material previously known as the SPARTAN's mattress as a sail. It was still raining.

The Chief portaged a huge box of food and air tanks back to his dry dock, his boots sloshing filthy water as he traipsed through land that was once dying of thirst. His vessel stood nearly twelve feet tall on it's pontoons with a wicker metal hull, a pointed blast shield at the front for wind and shelter, and a length of the original radio antenna with the collapsed sail suspended on a separate pole. He boosted his cargo up onto the bed, then climbed up himself. Opening a hatch in the covered portion, he dropped the box into a perfectly prepared void in the bed.

Cortana was very proud of her work. "Ingenious design, isn't it?"

He didn't bother responding and feeding her ego. "Is that everything?"

"Unless you want to take any souvenirs."

"No thanks." He said, dropping back down to the beach and making a soggy crater in the sand. "There's not a thing here I want to keep."

"Then I guess all we need are the ores and the mooring line." She said. "You've done a good job, Chief. It came together expertly and in record time! You're a master craftsman."

He headed back up through the marsh toward town. "Great. Something to do in the private sector."

"Don't be silly, Chief." She said. "You'll never leave the military. You're a marine. They'll always need soldiers."

"You're right." He said. "If private citizenship is anything like living here I can't wait to reenlist."

Cortana's voice softened toward him. "That I can't say."

The rain drove on, limiting visibility. In the distance to the right, he could see the shadowy shape of the crashed Flood ship, even now emitting a thin trail of noxious smoke. It was like a stain on the world: a sign that nothing the Flood touched could ever return to the way it was. He didn't mind leaving it behind.

Cortana changed the subject in the form of a question. "Are you proud of your ship?"

"Proud?"

"Yeah, you did a good job." She said. "You should be proud of it."

"I just followed your instructions." He replied.

"But it was your work." She said. "You were proud of your tower."

"Yeah, well..." He shook his head. "Here's hoping the boat fares better than that."

"It will." She said. "Your tower would have done fine if a severe thunderstorm hadn't moved in next door. There was no way to prepare for that."

"What's done is done." He said. "It made good thatch."

She mused. "That it did."

Soon they were on the doorstep of Cant. The Chief realized this was the last time he would see his home away from home, and had strangely mixed feelings about it. Sure he'd never wanted to be here. True he never wanted to return, but this place gave him shelter during his stay, and a place to come back to when he ventured off. When he found it, it was a shining alabaster hamlet. Now it was drab, dreary and half destroyed by his own hand. He'd treated the place poorly but used it well. He wasn't as happy as he'd thought he'd be to say goodbye. "Do you have pictures of this place?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, lets get going."

He gathered the things he needed. A set of two thick boards intended for use as oars and several feet of rope made of braided wire. It was the easiest load he'd carried yet and balanced evenly on his shoulder. He moved down the gravel road, stopping once to look back, then leaving Cant behind.

The sound of constant rain seemed louder somehow as they made their way back. He felt the drum of it on his helmet and watched it stream off his bent elbow. He felt it squelch under his feet.

He knew this land blindfolded. Every inch of it was committed to memory from the hundreds of patrols he'd taken waiting to be rescued. Now it was a dismal place he could barely recognize. They walked past the forest, the leaves heavy and drooping with rain. Everything was gray.

Cortana was feeling the same way. She remembered their first day on this planet, hiking off into this same growth of trees during what she now figured was the summer of HK-154. So much had happened to them since then. "Do you want to go visit the Dawn?"

"What?"

"The crash site. Do you want to visit?"

"Not really." He answered. "What would be the point?"

"I don't know," she said. "It's just that we'll never see it again. I didn't know if you wanted to look it over one more time."

"We've gutted the thing." He said.

She was very uncomfortable with the idea of passing the site up. For some reason taking one last look was very important to her. "Please?"

He stopped, set down the gear and turned up into the woods. "Alright, Cortana. If you want to."

"Thanks Chief."

"Just don't make me go back up to the top of that mountain for you."

"That's okay." She said, laughing a little. "I've got pictures of that too."

They walked the narrow stretch of the forest, emerging near the bluffs on the other side. The crash site was far enough north to be veiled in fog, making visibility poor with the rain obscuring the sky and the mist covering the ground. They stepped over bits of twisted metal, the wreckage appearing thicker and thicker until finally they saw it, the pale hulking shape of their vessel sticking up out of the mud, rain spatter creating a shimmering halo about the wreck. The Chief stopped and stared, taking in the scene. It was a sort of visual poetry, and he found he was glad she made him detour this way. This was their lifeboat. It had saved them from the rings, the void of space, and from death on impact at the cost of its own life.

It had served them well, and here it was. A ruin in the middle of an uncharted planet, smashed and mangled beyond recognition, exposed to the elements and soon to be abandoned to the annals of history. It was a sobering, tragic scene.

Cortana spoke a little sadly. "It's almost a shame to leave it behind."

"Yeah." He agreed.

"I feel like we should give it a eulogy or something." She said.

He watched the rain pour down the curved metal like rivers. "Other ships have met worse fates than this."

"Have they really?" Cortana asked. "The Dawn is us. Separated from the rest of humanity, left broken and battered in a strange place. And we're abandoning it again. I feel like I'm hurting its feelings."

"I thought machines didn't have feelings." He said. "I thought that was impossible."

Cortana paused. "Well..." She knew he was talking about her. "It's not."

He nodded knowingly. Moving forward, he bent down and took up a sharp piece of debris. Although he highly doubted another human would ever pass this way, something as poignant as this was bound to be discovered some day; maybe by another alien race, maybe in a million years, but fate had a way of leading people toward places with meaning. He scratched a message into the side of the ship.

'Here Lies Forward Unto Dawn, UNSC FFG-201'

'Has our thanks. 117.'

Cortana approved.


	17. log17

-1All that was left to load was him. The Master Chief ran through a mental check, hoping he had enough of everything to last him the trip. The passage would probably take a month tops at worst. He shrugged and got a good grip on the pontoon runners. "Well, I guess we're off."

"Wait." Cortana bade. "You should christen it."

He let go and straightened again. "Christen it? You're serious?"

"For good luck." She insisted. "You should at least give it a name."

"Hmn." He thought a second and started pushing it toward the water. "How about the UNSC Boat."

"Come on, you can do better than that."

"The UNSC 3x5 Emergency Transport."

"You're being too literal."

He shoved the pontoons through the wet sand, the water up to his shins. "Oh, you're asking for creativity?"

"Yeah, impress me." She grinned in his head.

"Tall order." He said. The water was up to his waist. He stopped shoving and got a good grip on the bed. "All aboard." He hoisted up onto the deck, the sea water streaming down cracks in his armor. He grabbed one of his oar pieces poled the rest of the way out to sea. He got a final shove off the upturned car sculpture; it fell over sideways and vanished beneath the waves.

He pulled in the oar and set the sail. The rain beat steadily down on top of them, filtering through the woven deck to join the sea below. The wind wasn't strong, but was heading southward and the soggy canvas caught what it could. All that was left was to ride their momentum toward their ultimate end.

The Chief sat himself down on the rear edge and watched the storm-shrouded land drift slowly away. "Maybe we should have given the thing a rudder."

"We'll be fine." Cortana assured him. "If we stray off course, we can move the sail to get us back." She watched through is visor as details of the shore faded to gray. "Look at that."

"You can't even see the mountain." The Chief noted. "That rainstorm... Only manufactured weather can be that miserable for so long."

"Not true, there are places in the galaxy where it rains all the time." Cortana said.

He shook his head. "Remind me never to visit."

Cortana laughed. "It's good you've found this out about yourself."

The waves rocked higher the further out they went. The Chief drug his boots in the water, the years of grime washing in clumps off the soles. The sky over the land was growing darker as they watched, or perhaps they were just leaving the darkest part behind.

Cortana realized she was feeling strange. It had to be an emotion, but it wasn't quite like the others she'd experienced before. She didn't like it. "Chief?"

"Hmn?"

"What are you feeling right now?"

He paused. It should have been a rather personal question, but he had no qualms about sharing with her, perhaps because they'd shared so much already. "Relief."

"Relief?" She asked. She thought she'd experienced relief before.

"Yeah." He said. "This is it. The only thing we could have done. Our last chance." He looked up, the rain was lightening. "If this fails, I die knowing I did all I could."

Cortana processed this a minute. "So, you feel good?"

"As good as can be expected."

She was not satisfied with this response. "I don't feel good about it."

"What do you mean?" He asked, soundings suspicious. "Did we forget something?"

"No, not about that." She said.

"About what then?"

"I'm not sure." She said. "I just know I don't feel good."

He considered the possibilities. "Is it like what you felt at the Dawn?"

"No." She said. "I felt sorry there."

"How about when the power went out?"

"I don't know." Cortana admitted. "It's almost like I'm sad to leave it... The little world we built together. But I know I don't want to go back, and there's no reason to stay."

He nodded slowly. "You're feeling bittersweet."

The term felt right. "I guess so."

He pulled his legs up out of the water to stand on deck. "If it helps, I've got at little too."

"What?"

"Bittersweet." He said. "I think its natural."

"Thanks, Chief." She replied. "That does help."

They stood and looked a little longer, the boat trolling slowly out to sea, until a sudden brightness drew the Chief's attention. He turned and saw the sun shining through the thinning clouds. The rain had changed to a fine drizzle and the slim ribbon of a rainbow. In the distance, the southern continent was a thumbnail on the horizon.

Cortana 'ah'ed in wonder. "It's beautiful!"

"It's cliche." He said.

"It's lovely." She said, sharply. "Admit that it's pretty."

"No." He said. "It's the light of the sun, which I'm more than happy to see finally, reflecting off the rain which is still falling in my face."

She 'tsk'ed at him. "Admit it's pretty."

"It's pretty." He said.

"Good job."

The further out to sea, the greater the transformation. The sky was changing from gray to blue, the steely sea was shifting from slate to dark teal, and the sail filled to full volume as it drug them through the waves. It was a rainbow moment of abandoned care or thought as a sense of discovery and hope settled. The huge problems they were facing and the vastness of the universe gave way temporarily and let them be.


	18. log18

Sunshine was fun and all, being stuck under it with nowhere to go for a day and a half, ran the charm dry pretty quick. The Master Chief lay on his back, the shadow of his small shelter falling far enough across his visor to keep the dimmers off, abd wasting his time tossing a piece of HK-154 produce up and down. He flung it up with the motion of both wrists, watched it gain altitude, fight physics, hang, obey gravity and return to the raft where he'd catch it in one hand or the other. It was the left's turn; it did a good job. Both hands flung it up again.

Cortana was bored. "Are you ever going to eat that?"

"Eventually." He said. The right caught the fruit with equal dexterity. The two hands congratulated each other and sent it up again.

"You know, we only have one MRE left." Cortana said. "We'll have to find a new source of protein for you when we get to shore."

"And me without any leather to eat." He said. "This bothersome modern age we live in.."

"At least you have enough vitamin C." Cortana noted. "You won't catch scurvy like a pirate."

"Hah!" He caught the fruit with sarcasm. "I would die laughing."

"You'd die doing other things too."

"I'm not getting scurvy." He replied.

The quiet sounds of the open ocean passed between them punctuated by the regular 'thump' of fruit hitting hand. "You still haven't named your boat." Cortana said. "Have you been thinking?"

"Not really." He said. "I'm sort of in a pleasantly useless state of brain-death. There's not a lot going on."

"Well, I've been thinking." Cortana said. "And I think you should call it something symbolic, like the 'UNSC Abiding Hope' or the 'UNSC Chartered Future' or something like that."

"I'm not that poetic." He said, sending the fruit skyward again. "I'd rather name it 'UNSC Life Boat'."

"How about 'UNSC Toward New Land'?" She offered.

"The 'UNSC Hasty Assemblage'."

"The 'UNSC Backward Glance'"

"I most definitely don't like that one." He said. "At this point I'd say it was the 'UNSC Staring Up'."

"You're right. We should remain hopeful." Cortana said, pondering. "How about the 'UNSC Imminent Doom'?"

He caught the fruit and gawked a minute. "That's hopeful?"

"No I guess its not."

"You're getting a little random." He said, tossing again.

"I'm just floating on a stream of consciousness." She said. "Just saying what comes to mind."

"I'm proud of you for not being worried about making little to no sense." He said. "You usually freak out if you mistake something like 'hopeful' for 'horrifying'."

She realized he was right. "Should I freak out? Do you think it's that important?"

"Put it off until later." He said. "Nothing we can do about it."

"Good point." She got back to thinking. "How about the 'UNSC Radiant Sunshine'?"

"Whoa." He caught and held his toy. "U-Turn. I think you made me diabetic."

"It's not that bad!"

"'Radiant Sunshine'?" He resumed his previous occupation. "You're joking I hope."

"We are enjoying the sunshine." She noted.

"Then we should call it the 'UNSC Rain No More'." He said.

"I like that one." She noted, pleased. "Its lighthearted and fun to say."

"I'm not traveling on the 'UNSC Rain No More'." He said. "Lets name it something manly like the 'UNSC Bloody Onslaught'. Maybe people will fear us and give us gifts."

"What people?"

He ignored her. "The 'UNSC Expectant Offering'. Better; the 'UNSC Expensive Taste'. No, the 'UNSC Drop Your Weapons, This is a Stickup'."

"That would be hard to spray paint on the side of something as small as this." Cortana smiled.

"We can make it into an acronym. The 'UNSC DYW, TS'"

Cortana sounded it out. "Diwts?"

"Yes, the 'UNSC DITZ'." He shook his head at the stupidity of the idea and continued catching. "The most intimidating ship in the fleet."

"I still like 'Toward New Land'." Cortana said. "Because its true and sounds respectable."

"I guess that works." He said.

She noticed that he didn't sound convinced. "We can keep thinking if you want."

"I don't really care." He said.

"How about the 'UNSC Chiefy Boat'?" She teased. "You are its captain, we can name it after you."

"If I'm the captain I'm supposed to name it after my mother or my girlfriend or my daughter." He said. "And we end up with something really lame like the 'UNSC Suzy-Q'."

She laughed. "You named your daughter 'Suzy-Q'?"

"Not by choice." He said. "It was her mother's fault I'm sure. She's probably Mary Jane or something else."

"You know Mary Jane was once a drug reference back at the turn of the millennium." Cortana offered.

"See, look, that explains everything."

Cortana laughed again. She'd been doing it more often since they left Cant. "It's sweet that you'd name your ship after a girl though, that's very chivalrous."

"It'd be more chivalrous if I knew any girls." He sighed. "Present company excluded of course."

"You can name it after Miranda." Cortana offered.

"I'm not naming it after Miranda." He scoffed.

"She died, it could be a tribute." Cortana reasoned.

"Johnson can name a boat after Miranda." The Chief said.

"He's dead too."

"All the more appropriate." His voice took on a bitter grate.

Cortana suspected it was a mistake to bring up his recently deceased friends. "We don't have to do that then. We don't have to name it after anything. We can name it 'Radiant Sunshine'."

"No." He repeated. "Might as well name it 'UNSC Aim Here'."

"We want people to find us." She said. "Maybe we should name it 'Aim Here'."

"The 'UNSC Rescue Us Please'." The Chief offered. "The 'UNSC Over Here!'."

"I don't think we're going to be found until we get a new beacon going on the southern continent." Cortana said. "So it might be premature to call it something having to do with 'Please Find Us'."

"Then I guess its more appropriate to call it the 'UNSC Meantime' or the 'Interim' or the 'Pateince'."

"How about 'Second Chance'?" Cortana asked. "The 'UNSC Second Chance'?"

"Sounds good." He agreed.

"And she's the first of her fleet so she'd be the 'UNSC Second Chance, AAA - 001' under Captain John-117, Master Chief of the SPARTAN program."

"So christened." He caught his fruit and sat back up. "And I guess that makes you my ship-board AI."

Her voice sounded like a sweeping bow. "At your service, Captain!"

"A toast then." He took a deep breath, popped the pressure seal on his MJOLNIR armor, hiked up his helmet, took a bite and sealed himself back in so he could breath again. He swallowed and lay back down. "Eating is slow."

"I want you to know I find it very entertaining."

"Stop spying on my insides." He said, tossing the half-eaten food in the air again to resume his game.


	19. log19

-1They were only fifty miles off shore when the wind turned to the east and started taking them sideways, parallel to the shoreline. Progress at a crawl, the Chief did his best to set his boat on course. The most he could manage with the sail was to set them south-eastish and when he tried to row, one of his ores broke in half. After a couple hours of tracing a slow arc toward their goal, the poor SPARTAN was going mad.

"Ten days out here!" He shouted at the distant shore. "Ten days and we're so close!!"

"Calm down, Chief!" Cortana cried. "We'll get there!"

"But I can see the little buildings!" He insisted. "It waited until we were close enough to taste it and then changed just to mess with us! Manufactured weather! ERG!"

"We'll be there soon." She said. "We'll just hope that the wind changes."

"I don't like hope." He said. "I've hoped before and it didn't come through. I'd rather do something about it."

"There's nothing to do." She said. "The direction of the wind is beyond our control."

"If I didn't weigh so much I could swim for it." He said. "If I wasn't a human tank, I could make it there in five minutes."

"Again," Cortana said, "beyond our control."

"Aaaaagh." He sank down to his ankles and stared at the shoreline. "Why am I so impatient?"

"I think it's cute." Cortana said. "You're like a little kid."

"I'm a frustrated old man." He replied, dropping down to hang his boots over the side into the water. They were clean up to his knees now. Hanging his feet in the water was one of the few things he had available for entertainment. He put his chin in his hand and studied the tiny white buildings and the shining radio antenna on the bluffs. The brown sand lining the beaches and rocky crags contrasted the vibrant green of a well-watered forest. There was a mountain on this continent as well. It was probably a tenth the size of the one he'd left, but sloped much more drastically up over the town like a stone soldier. He ached for a closer look. It was the first new thing in two years.

"You've survived worse." Cortana reminded him.

"You know, people say that." He told her, sarcastically. "And every time they say it I can't help but notice that it doesn't help the current situation at all. I mean, honestly, how is right now supposed to be helped by remembering other times when I was miserable?"

"That's a good point, I never thought of it like that."

He looked over the edge down into the dark water. "How deep do you think this is?"

"I don't know." She replied. "Its impossible to tell."

"I want to find out." He said. He got out his mooring line. "What's something heavy?"

"I don't know, the box we packed the supplies in is pretty heavy."

"Hmn." He pulled the box out of its hatch in the floor and emptied the rest of his rations onto the deck. He set the oar slabs up as a lopsided pen to keep anything from rolling away and tied the twisted wire rope to the bottom of the case. Getting a firm grip on the free end of the line, he cast the box into the ocean and watched it vanish beneath the waves.

Cortana's voice sounded skeptical. "Why did we just do that?"

"Curiosity." He replied. He waited to see if the case hit the bottom. The boat trolled slowly. Suddenly the line went slack, then drug backward underneath them like it'd anchored. He made a fist of victory. "Success!"

"Successful in what way?"

He reeled the box back in, untied the line, set it in its slot, shoveled the food and stuff back in and retied the wet end of the string to the mast of the boat.

Cortana's voice changed quickly from skeptical to very concerned. "Chief, what are you doing?"

"We're getting there faster." He said. He checked the oxygen in his tank. Still half full. Perfect. He moved to the edge of the boat.

Cortana would have flailed if she could. "Chief!? Are you crazy!?"

"Yes." He answered, concretely. "Remember which way's south, Cortana."

"Chief! Can't we talk about this first!?"

He jumped ship and sank like a rock.

Falling through water was not exactly floating. He never expected to float… but drifting lazily through the ocean, the light of the sun dappling the surface as it moved slowly away from them, he figured it was as close as he was going to get. The water was like a shadow even his headlamps could not penetrate. He knotted the line around his wrist a third time and waited to find the ground. Cortana was not pleased.

"That was really stupid, Chief."

"I know what I'm doing."

"No you don't!" She cried. "You just jumped off a perfectly good boat. Is a little patience too much to ask?"

"At this point, yes, Cortana, I've totally exhausted my patience for now." His lamps searched for the ocean floor. He figured with visibility being what it was, he'd see it just in time to land on it.

Cortana grumbled. "It's probably going to be solid silt. It's going to be nothing but mud that's going to suction-cup us in and stick us until we both die."

"What was that about hope you were saying before?" The Chief asked, snidely.

"That was when we could see where we were going."

The ground appeared and he planted his boots solidly on the smooth rock. A thin cloud of dust billowed up and caught the light of his lamps. "How's that?"

"Lucky."

"Yes I am." He said. "Which way's south?"

"Forward." She said. "For about three hours."

"A three hour walk? Great!" He actually seemed pleased with the idea. "I can get back what I've atrophied off."

Cortana finally caved. "Please don't work yourself too hard."

"I'll be fine."


	20. log20

-1The Chief was thankful for Cortana's convenient nav point on his HUD screen, keeping him from getting lost in this flat gray world. The ocean floor was a series of solid rock shelves sloping gently into each other beneath his feet like scales. There were no sharp edges to speak of, and the whole thing looked like a long-cooled lava flow moving down from the land in slow processions over time. The Chief imagined this planet in its raw state, active volcanoes dotting the place with red magma bubbling at their feet. In a way it made a lot of sense that this prison planetoid he was stuck on used to be a hell-hole.

They neared another ridge in the rock and moon-jumped up it. The water's surface was getting closer and closer as the hours passed.

Cortana was bored to tears. She'd scanned and re-scanned the place over and over but there was simply nothing to see. She missed being in control of a ship where there were millions of things to check and recheck, and the possibility of sudden crises requiring her attention. She checked their depth again. "Another 700 feet or so."

"That close?"

"You're making good time."

"It feels good." He replied. "I'm enjoying it."

"Good, then, I guess." She replied. "I'm glad you are at least."

"If you knew what moving felt like, you'd agree." He said. "After sitting on that raft for a week and a half? I'm going to be sore and I'm looking forward to it."

"I guess you've got me there," she admitted. She never would know what motion felt like, but then he'd never know the satisfaction of running nearly five thousand complex processes simultaneously under pressure. Silver lining she supposed, and she had the thought to hold it over his head but realized he probably wouldn't care. "Do you think everything's okay on the boat?"

"I'm sure it's fine."

"You know... All the air you have left is on that raft." She quickly checked the amount in his tank. "Just abandoning it is making me a little nervous."

"The boat was your design, Cortana." He reminded her.

"I know."

"I left everything in the little box you built for it." He said. "Is the box secure?"

"Yes."

"Is the box supposed to keep everything safe?"

"Yes."

"Then stop worrying." He climbed another shelf. "We'll be on shore soon enough."

"Are you sure the tow wire will hold?" She asked. "I mean, the boat can be fine, but you can't swim to catch it if it gets away."

"It was supposed to be the anchor line." He said. "If it wasn't strong enough it doesn't matter if we'd stayed on board or not, we'd be cosmically screwed either way."

Cortana sighed and didn't say another thing until the surface was in sight.

They climbed higher and higher, the Chief staring upward a the dappled surface. Cortana suddenly began to note features of the shore line in her scans, her excitement level rose with each new detail that appeared. "Hey Chief! Ten more feet! We're almost there!" He couldn't help but smile at her eagerness. "Let's go!"

He quickened his pace, scaling the last of three rises then finally breaking the surface. Sea water beaded down his rain-resistant visor, breaking the white daylight into pinpoints in his eyes. The sun seemed bright and foreign after so long in the dark; it was as if they'd traveled underwater through space and finally surfaced on another planet. Cortana cheered in triumph, the Chief stood for a moment and marveled at how close he was to the shore.

They'd surfaced at the base of the bluff, and the SPARTAN could see up the weather-worn cliff to a tall white building. The daylight glinted white off the perfect radio antenna as it pointed radiantly toward the sky. The shore had been washed clean from a month of rain, and the colors were more vibrant and lively than any he'd seen on his previous continent. It was like Shangri-la. He turned to check that his boat was still there. It was, and no worse for wear as far as he could tell. Things couldn't get any better. He turned toward the beach. "Let's make ourselves at home."

"Sounds fantastic!" She scanned their new surroundings, reading the local weather and news feeds familiar to Cant. The flow of information made her feel good all over.

The Master Chief stomped his way onto the beach, planting his boots firmly in the brown sand as if staking a claim, then turned back to ocean to reel in the raft. Pontoons secure on dry land, he let himself drop down to the sand to stare at the sky and revel in his sense of accomplishment. Cortana's voice was proud of him. "Good job, Chief, I'm sorry I questioned you."

"You're fine, Cortana." He replied. "Desperation drives everyone to weird ends. It wasn't a logical step to take."

"But it worked out."

"And hurray for that." He levered himself up. "Time for exploring"

"We should probably assess the state of equipment we're working with."

"Right. To the radio tower."

The Chief jogged up the beach to the nestle of buildings. The place was a cookie-cutter of Cant, white houses at Unngai scale with gravel rows layed out in a grid. To his disappointment, his town was much smaller with no more than thirty buildings in all and limited in architectural variety. To its north was the vast stretch of sea, to the south the imposing heights of the mountain and the two other directions were covered by thick forest.

"What are you going to call it?" Cortana asked.

He started up the slope leading to the antenna. "The town?"

"Yeah, you've got a new town." She said. "You're the Mayor of it too."

He thought back to the discovery of Cant. It felt like both yesterday and a lifetime ago. "What do the airwaves say?"

"They call this 'Cant' too." She replied. "I think its the generic term for a town."

"So Cant... I mean the other town... They just called it 'town' all the time?" He asked. "I thought they were unoriginal but really..."

"Yep." She replied. "They are a simple people."

"And we're intelligent so we need to name it something?"

"Of course." Cortana scoffed. "Civilized people must christen things. It proves we have knowledge of the universe beyond our immediate vicinity. Other towns for example." She sounded amused. "Plus I like hearing the names you come up with."

"Because I'm really good at this." He shook his head. "Okay, I'll think of something."

"Maybe name it after your sister or your daughter or your girlfriend." She suggested with a laugh. "Suzy-Q was it?"

"I'd sooner call it 'Wont' or 'Who the Hell Cares'." He replied. "I don't know. The last one was called 'Cant', and I've had so much practice finding significant titles for things, we can't call it something stupid." He reached the top of the ridge, the gray ocean sparkling silver for miles around him, then turned back to survey his new home. "I'm going to call it 'Why'."

"What?"

"No, 'Why'." He said.

"Why 'Why'?" She asked.

He shrugged. "It's short for 'Why Not'."

"I like it." She said, satisfied. "I like it a lot."

"Thank you." He said in the same tone. "Thank you very much."


	21. log21

-1Even though it itched in every cell of his body, the Chief suppressed the need to explore his new island in favor of more important tasks; like breathing. Why was significantly smaller than Cant, so it lacked essential mechanical objects, like cars and wrecked ships, that were readily available for dissassemblage and repurposing at the previous site. He went in and out of the little bungaloes looking for anything useful. He found radio sets, antenna equipment, view-screens, something that looked like a sump-pump that he maliciously ripped from the floor: he toted these back to the hillside power plant where he and Cortana had established home base.

"I don't know what we're going to do with it but put it in the corner, Chief." Cortana said regarding the sump-pump. "We'll figure something out."

He unloaded it onto the heap with the rest of the garbage he'd collected.

She was having a fantastic time. Hodge-podging impromptu machinery together had become something of a hobby for her hyperactive mind. Even as they were gathering parts, she was arranging them into virtual schematics and had a pretty good idea about how to put their transmitter together. She'd also figured out a way to set up another holo-pad to give the Master Chief a little space. He hadn't complained, but she thought it would be something nice she could do for him after all the work.

"Okay, what else do we need?" He asked, surveying the piles of junk on the cement floor of the plant.

"We desperately need a filter of some kind." She answered. "I was hoping we would find a car engine of some kind."

"I can look again."

"Okay." She agreed. "I half expect one of these houses to own the equivalent of a sports car… something totally impractical but kept for material reasons so that they can shine it and drive it up and down the street to show off to their friends."

"And the moral of the story is that evolution is a fraud and nothing ever changes." He summarized. "Even the simplest of creatures… those who can't name their own towns and forget that other people live a couple days' boat ride away… behave the same way as our supposedly superior civilization has for hundreds of years."

"Yes." She said. "I guess when you put it that way I am."

"Profound." He decided to walk up the back alley of the town on an unpaved track wedged between the mountain wall and the buildings. Things were still a little muddy in the shade, and his shiny green armor reacquired some of the grime it was used to. He took a moment to realize that his time in the showers and walk underwater had cleaned every speck of orange Flood-guts off his suit. "So when we can't find a car to nab a filter from, then what?"

"Then we'll have to find something natural to use. We might be able to use the canvas from your sail, but I've devised a way to compress a filter out of plant fibers, although your air may be scented from now on…"

"Soldiers pay money for that kind of service." He joked.

"This isn't going to be potpourri, Chief." She prodded back.

"I'll stand it.": He replied. "I probably smell worse than anything else after nearly three years in here."

"Like a good can of sardines." She replied. "I'm sure it's keeping you very fresh."

"Fresh. Right." He rounded the back of one of the bigger houses. "We can only hope." There was nothing back there so he moved on. "After we've got that taken care of then what?"

"Well," she thought, "we should probably get to the beacon."

"You're right, that's the next most important."

"It shouldn't take long." She said. "Although actually encoding a signal might be tough. It's hard to get the native computers to read anything but what has been hard-coded in and that's mostly weather information. If I can hack the archives though… I can reach those through the airwaves, I can probably embed a message into those and wire something out."

"I trust you to figure it out." He rounded another building to find nothing. "What after that?"

"Are you fishing for something?"

"Maybe." He answered.

She mused. "After that I'm concerned about your protein problem. You won't be much of a super soldier all weak and gangly from poor nutrition."

"So a foraging expedition." He assumed. "That would consist of me wandering out aimlessly in the woods with the demasculating job of gathering nuts and seeds and roots and such."

"Yes unfortunately."

"Lets get to that one soon." He replied. "Not that I'm in a hurry to tuck my image into a wicker basket and prance off, but I want to see what's in those woods. I want to see the other shores. Maybe there's a huge pile of MREs up on the top of the mountain that I can go find. I like the sound of that."

"Hah, I've painted the basket image into my head now." She replied. "And things don't leave my head so easy."

"I'm sure you've got enough blackmail on me by now, a little extra can't hurt me." He replied.

"That's right." She confirmed. "You'll never work in this town again."

"Oh for shame."

"I know it's a crime." She grinned in his ear. "But you know of course that I'd never do anything like that to you."

"Oh really?" He asked. "All this material and you'll never hold it over my head for anything."

"I didn't say that." She scoffed. "I said I'd never hurt you with it. Manipulate you is a different story entirely."

"Hmph." He found a squarish sliding door in the back of the last building on the block. If he tilted his head to the side it reminded him of a garage door, so he dug his fingers under one side and hoped the resemblance didn't stop on the surface. He peeled it back and let sunlight stream on the familiarly hunching shape of a shiny white Unggai trophy vehicle.

Cortana's voice was smart. "Am I good or what?"


	22. log22

No matter how necessary an activity it was, when push came to shove, nut gathering was embarrassing. It didn't matter that he was the only living person there and Cortana was chilling by her lonesome back at the antenna on her new holo-pad, he still felt kind of stupid, and kept reminding himself how hungry he was as he stooped to pick up another fallen seed.

The trees on his new land were different from the ones to the north. They were still deciduous as far as he could tell, but they had a strange sprucing shape about halfway between a pine tree and a palm tree. He was thankful they weren't evergreens, pinecones did not sound tasty.

He was nearing the edge of this patch of trees, having officially worked his way around the base of the mountain a second time. Ultimately his new continent was an island. It was big enough to hold the mountain and the town and that was it. This was disappointing to say the least. He was looking forward to grand explorations of new territories, but instead all the had was a future of really boring and repetitive walks. Yet despite these setbacks, he could not deny that once again, the southern shore was his favorite.

He walked from the shadow of the leaves out onto a wide stretch of sparkling dusty brown sand. Like a sea of diamonds leading to a sea of glass, the coarse beach glistened as he moved across it. It was perfectly flat except for where he'd broken it with his footsteps on his previous visit, and he realized it would probably never again be the immaculate blanket of shoreline he'd first discovered. What a waste.

He tried to match his previous path as best he could as he made his way down to the water front. The vast slate ocean was barely moving at all save for the gentle roll of deep-sea currents. There was no other land in sight, just the endless glass horizon stretching out around him as far as he could see. He stepped into the shallows and sighed. He was so tired of this planet. Tired in general, but specifically of this place and its sense of isolation. He realized in that moment that he missed the feel of Cortana in his head.

He'd have to bring her here. Maybe in a couple hours when the sun was setting, then they could see what their new beach at dusk looked like and watch night come on together. That sounded peacefully distracting enough to actually excite him. He jogged back up the beach to his path and headed around the mountain to the book-ended forest on the other side.

His satchel of protein was only half full. He doubted he could fill it all the way by the time he got back around to Why, but figured there was no hurry. These two woods would always be here dropping nuts for him to pick up. Maybe he'd forget about it and go straight back now to see how Cortana was getting on with the distress signal and tell her about the beach. With a glance at the sky, he thought 'why not' and avoided another look at the ground until he'd passed through the western woods and emerged in town again.

Nothing had changed about Why since the last time he'd seen it, which was about two hours ago, it really was a sleepy little town. He marched up the hill toward the Cliffside power plant and ducked in to see Cortana's flickering holographic form standing four inches tall on their hodge-podged pad. She seemed overwhelmingly delighted to see him. "Cheif! You're back!"

He put his bag down and sat eye-level with her stand. "This island is small."

"How small?"

"Real small." He reached into the bag and pulled out one of the larger nuts. "Do I have to do anything special to eat these?"

"Crack the shell?" She asked. "Are bacteria and viruses sentient? They should be clean enough on the inside."

"Cracking shells is something I can do." He crushed the nut in his hand. "I guess we can always cook them in case."

"Boil some water." Cortana suggested. "Lucky for us there's a well in this building too. I guess it was used for everything."

"They didn't have a lot of room to put things anywhere else." He said, rising. "Furnace?"

"By the turbines." She replied. "Electrically powered."

"Huh." He walked over to investigate. "That's impressive actually, I didn't think the Unggai were that smart."

"The homes didn't have running water when we went through earlier." Cortana recalled. "They probably came up here for water needs. Maybe the furnace was for bath water."

"So its an electrical plant, a radio station, a well, a furnace and a public shower." He said, finding a basin and the spout for the well water. "This place must have been crowded."

"I guess." She said. Her voice was sobering up again, the thrill of having him home wearing off. "Chief, I've got good news and bad news."

He shut the water off. "What's the bad news?"

"Well, I can't get my home-made transistor working." She said. "The only way to send our distress message is if I'm here doing it myself."

He paused in his activity. "Yourself? Does that mean you're stuck here talking to space from now on?"

"I'm afraid so." She said. "I've got a sub-system on it now. It's broadcasting the same message as before, but I have to actually be here to keep it going, and I still can't receive information back."

He was surprised how sad he was at the news, he'd been looking at every inch of land waiting to bring Cortana back and show her what he'd found. There wasn't a lot of point to exploring without her along. He remembered his task and put the pot of water on the furnace-powered hotplate near the floor. "So, what's the good news?"

"I've been broadcasting our distress message for nearly five hours, now." She answered. "I'm using the exact same frequency as before so if anyone's listening they'll pick us up. They know we're still alive! We'll be rescued again."

"What's the probability of that, really?" He asked, skeptically.

"Impossible to say." She replied. "But we can hope, can't we?"

The basin was taking forever to come to a boil so he moved and sat back down. "It's too bad you can't move. I wanted to take you out tonight."

"Out?" She sounded highly amused. "You wanted to take me 'out'?"

"On the other side of the mountain there's this beach that looks like a post card. I thought you'd like it."

"Is it better than the beach from the other continent?" She asked.

"Much better." He said.

"Can you see more land from there?"

"You can't see anything except sand and ocean and sky." He replied. "Its a perspective-maker."

"It sounds mystifying." She said. "I'm sorry I'll miss it."

"You know, you don't have to miss it." He hinted, slowly.

"Chief, are you suggesting I cut off the beacon just so I can see this beach with you?"

He heard the water finally bubbling but ignored it. "... yes?"

She was dumbfounded. "So you'll prioritize this beach over anyone finding us?"

"We'll be gone for an hour max. It's been off for weeks now, an hour won't make a difference."

She tilted her head to one side to study him, having a hard time comprehending. "You've changed."

He got up and grabbed his sack. "Water's boiling."

"The last time the beacon stopped, you spiraled into a depression that incapacitated you for days!" She reminded him. "I can't believe you're going to shut it off willingly."

He upended the satchel into the water, not bothering to shell anything beforehand. A great cloud of steam bellowed out. "Forget I mentioned it."

"No I'm just trying to understand." She persisted. "Is rescue less important now than it was then?"

"Maybe I'm jaded." The Chief replied, walking over to her. "I'm worn out of hope. All I have left is time and enough apathy to give it all to fate." He put his hands on his hips. "And I wanted you to see the sunset."

She smiled at him as best she could with her limited projection. "That's really sweet of you, Chief."

"Yeah I'm a regular Casanova." He said, sarcastically. He prodded the mixture in the water with a nearby stirring rod. "I think I've invented porridge."

"If you've invented it, you should name it."

"You've got some preoccupation with names." He noted.

She shrugged. "I like to define things. Call it my nature."

"Okay." He said, finding a ladle on the wall where the stirring stick had been. "I dub it your nature."

"Thank you for being my qualifier."

He spooned out some of his reduction and watched it drip off and plop back into the water in clumps. She couldn't see his face but could imagine the grimace he was wearing. "Does it need to cook longer?"

"I don't know what it needs." He replied. "At least I'm confident that any sentient non-sentient deadly life forms are gone."

"Along with structural integrity." She laughed. "If only you had some flour to thicken it up."

"If only." He looked around and spotted stacks of dishware in the corner. "I'm starting to think this is a cafeteria as well... I keep finding all the supplies I need."

"Maybe its magic." Cortana suggested. "Maybe you think 'I need a spoon' and the magic building produces it for you out of its basic molecular components."

He paused. "Or it could be a cafeteria." He found the bowls, but they were too small for him so he moved on. In a cabinet was some kind of clay pot that would serve him better, plus there was some novelty to having a bowl with a handle. "That stuff is starting to stink. Maybe this was a bad idea."

"You'd have to eat it anyway." Cortana said. "At least this way it's hot."

He peered in. "I think this is as good as its going to get." He spooned some of it out into his pot, grabbed a shallower utensil and walked over to sit next to Cortana again. "I think I'll call it 'Yuck'."

"I love your simply descriptive naming strategy." Cortana prodded him. "Its very 'you'."

"First I've changed and then I haven't changed." He said. "Is that an error in judgment?"

"That's a testament to your humanity." She replied. "Are you going to eat or not?"

"There's a bunch of hard bits in it."

"You should have taken the shells off."

"I think I got some grass too..."

"Fiber." She replied simply. "Just tell yourself how nutritious and important it is to your metabolism."

He stirred at it. "Hmn."

She sighed. "I tell you what. You eat it and maybe we can go do the sunset thing."

He turned his head slightly and she knew he was raising an eyebrow. "Maybe?"

She mused. "Eat your Yuck."


	23. log23

"Chief... Wow!"

The sky was the richest copper orange, the white sun of HK-154 glanced off the steel gray ocean making it look like glass reflecting the evening clouds. The dark sand beneath them was perfectly undisturbed and sparkled like a blanket of spread out from where they sat at the water's edge. The slow tide reached passively up to touch the heels of his boots.

He felt more peaceful than he ever had. "I told you, didn't I?"

"You sure did." She agreed, giving him a verbal pat on the back. "Almost makes abandoning the beacon worth the time."

He frowned. "Are you being sardonic?"

"Hmph," she considered the sunset again. "Maybe a little."

He sat up and leaned forward. "You'd rather be sitting back at HQ repeating the same phrase over and over than be out here with me?"

"I didn't say that!" She protested.

"Yes you did."

"No I didn't!" She insisted. "Chief, believe me when I say, honestly, that there is no other place I'd rather be right now than here on this beach with you."

He became suddenly sober. "How about home? Would you rather be there?"

She didn't hesitate. "No Chief. I'd rather be here than home. I'd rather be with you." She softened her voice to a low whisper. "You're my home."

He felt a smile grow hidden behind his faceplate. "Am I?"

"I don't lie."

"I know you don't."

He found himself struggling with a way to counter this very personal confession. It would have been nice to reply 'you're home to me too, Cortana' but he didn't quite feel that way. He enjoyed her company and missed her when she was gone, but he also knew that she was an AI and that he'd outlive her by decades. He felt his stomach knot thinking of the day her time would come. He would get through it though, he was strong. Contrarily, Cortana seemed lost and almost broken without him. Whenever they were separated for any length of time, her entire being, from her voice to her shape and color, would static and break apart like she was losing integrity, but a word from him would bring her back and make her alright again. He wondered if there was something about the bond they shared that superseded corrupted data or fatal errors received back on High Charity, like a safe mode or something. It would take teams of scientists to find a real answers; hers was a truly unique existence resulting from a irreproducible sequence of events.

Thinking about this didn't stop the churn in his gut, but it helped him realize what he wanted to say.

"I'm here for you, Cortana."

She smiled in his head. "Thank you, Chief."

"You're welcome." He leaned back again. He was starting to suspect that the gross feeling in his stomach was not an emotional response. "Maybe we should go back."

"The sun's not down yet," Cortana noted. "Did I ruin it for you?"

"No, I'm just tired." He said. "There will be other sunsets."

"Okay." She agreed.

He forked himself up from the turf and suddenly found himself reeling in a bout of lightheadedness. He reevaluated his footing and gave his inner ear a chance to sort itself out. Cortana noted his pause. "What's wrong."

"I don't know." He admitted. He shifted weight and chanced a step forward. Impact made his head hurt. "I'm having some kind of symptoms."

She grew instantly concerned. "Symptoms? What kind of symptoms?"

"Flu-like symptoms." He answered. He took another step and felt the world spin. "Whoa."

"I'll run a check on you." She said, reaching out to his neural interface. Her presence sent icy fingers down his back. The chill didn't help his stomach any. "Have you broken the seal on the suit today?"

"Only to eat."

"Are you drinking enough?"

"I don't know." He admitted.

"You could be dehydrated. That's probably the case. You cooked the food, there shouldn't have been anything left alive in it."

"That's all very logical." He said, focusing hard on the end of the beach. "Forgive me if I don't care right now, I'm more interested in getting back to HQ and passing out."

"Take a deep breath, Chief, pace yourself." Cortana coached. "It's no big deal, just a little exhaustion. I'm sure all you need is a glass of water and a good night's rest. You've been running on fumes since we left Cant..."

"I was built for worse." He made it to the woods and leaned heavily against the nearest tree. His head did another loop-the-loop and he was grateful for the support.

Cortana knew he was right. His immune system and endurance were top-notch by design. She also knew it was utterly impossible or him to have caught something, and didn't like her other options. She waited anxiously for her read-outs to provide a decent conclusion as to whether this was an immuno-response to a foreign substance or the untimely shut-down of the body itself, the figures she was seeing in the meantime were more and more distressing. "Your temperature is rising. It's gone up two degrees and isn't stopping. You need to take it slow, Chief, don't over-exert yourself."

"Slow I can do." He reached out and transferred to another tree. "Although its kind of a pain."

"You can do it Chief."

"Don't worry." He stumbled into another tree.

"Don't worry?" She asked. "You were fine two seconds ago! I think this is a perfect time to worry!"

"Not helping, Cortana." He wondered if he could get his helmet off fast enough to puke should the need arise. Holding his breath and vomiting at the same time might take a little preparation. Breathing methane probably wasn't good for him right now.

"I'm sorry, I just don't know what's going on... If its not a simple solution and something's actually going wrong..." She was starting to shake up again. He had to do something to calm her down.

"Hey." He paused against his current tree to catch his breath. "Don't freak out, it's gonna be alright."

"But how-"

"It's just exhaustion, like you said." He assured her. "It's nothing that won't fix itself. I'm not going to die on you."

"But..." She sounded racked with fear. "You promise?"

"Yes." He exhaled. "Again. Yes. I promise not to die on you."

"You can't control this kind of promise, Chief." She said, gravely. "You can't just decide how this condition is going to affect you. You're getting worse by the second and neither of us know for certain why. I should have seen it coming, I should have been attentive when something became abnormal."

"And now you're blaming yourself..." He heaved himself off and began his tree transferring again. "You said before it was impossible to get sick. Why would you waste your time monitoring my immune system?"

"You put something foreign in your body." She said. "That's cause enough to pay attention. I can't believe I didn't think of it. I'm getting so scattershot... Maybe I'm more broken than I thought."

"You're fine." He insisted, a little louder than he meant. Thinking of her problems had started this mess as far as he was concerned.

She noted his response and quieted her fears. "Yes, I'm fine. Don't worry about me."

"Of course you are." He said pointedly. "There's nothing wrong with either of us. We just need to get back to Why and sleep this off. We'll be fine in the morning."

"You're absolutely right." She was not convinced, but felt further discussion would only bring his determination down. She decided on a slightly ironic change of subject. "You know what's funny?"

He changed trees. "What?"

"Back when we first landed... All those months ago... I was really excited to watch your food go down."

He paused, remembered, and managed a half smile. "That is kind of funny."


	24. log24

-1By the time he reached the energy plant at the top of the hill, the Master Chief was running a temperature of one-hundred and three. The ground of the incline felt like walking on a water bed and waves of nausea and aching pain took turns inflicting misery on his poor armored body. Cortana's frantic readouts were coming in, but she'd stopped updating him on his condition a while ago. He had the floor of his headquarters foremost in his mind and refused to think of anything but falling flat on his face and sleeping for at least twenty-four hours.

In his history as a soldier, he'd been beat up, burned, shot, hurled through space, crushed, nearly drowned, and nearly infected with Flood spores but never in his career of pain had he ever been this sick. Caught bugs, sure, in all the SPARTAN wisdom and technology, there was still the occasional strain of influenza or common cold that snuck past his enhanced radar, but usually all it took was a vitamin shot in the arm and he was right as rain. Now he not only had no vitamin shots, he had no medicine of any kind and his natural defenses were kicking in to overdrive. Cortana spoke tentatively in his ear, the sound spiked his headache again. "Chief, I've got a diagnosis."

"Oh really?" He asked. He reached out and finally clutched the doorframe of the power plant like he'd found his way home from the desert.

"Yes." She said. "The chemical makeup of the plant life you ingested.. long story short, you've been poisoned."

"Poisoned?"

"From the yuck."

"From the yuck."

"That's right."

He rolled his shoulder off the doorway and stumbled unevenly into the main room. "Figures."

"It'll be okay though, we can treat this..." She mustered. "We've no time to waste, there are probably native plants around that can help us... Grasses, herbs, roots... Do you still have any of the elements you collected earlier that we could study and perhaps determine the source..."

"No." He moved to the pedestal in the center near the radio hookup and leaned heavily over it. "There's nothing left."

"Do you remember what you found? Could you find it again?"

"Not right now." He reached to the chip in the back of his head.

Cortana panicked. "Chief what are you doing!?"

"Sorry." He slipped the chip out and felt her coldness leave his head. To his relief, a portion of his headache left with her. He plugged her into her holopad and dropped to his knees. She shimmered to life before him. "Chief!?"

"Get the beacon running again, I'm checking out for a while." He collapsed sideways onto the floor, easing his head slowly to avoid a hit. "I'll hunt for medicine later."

"Chief, don't leave me here!" She leaned over the edge of the pad to look down at him lying still in a SPARTAN ball. "I can't read your vitals from here! Please put me back in!"

He waved a dismissive hand. "Start the beacon back up. Call for help. I'll be right here."

"Chief!?"

His hand dropped back to the floor by his head. "I'll be right here..." His voice trailed off and he didn't move again.

"Chief?" Her voice was shaking. "Chief?" His lack of motion scared her the most. She was afraid to take her eyes off him, but forced herself back to the center of her pad. She could feel herself trembling throughout, her voice was small and she couldn't make it any louder. "Chief..."

There was nothing else to do but do as he said. She relaunched her distress call and sent it into space. 'This is UNSC AI Cortana serial number CTN 0452-9 broadcasting on all open UNSC frequencies...' She sent the prepared message to a subroutine, "Please hurry...", and crawled her holographic image to the edge of the pedestal again, looking over at her collapsed supersoldier whose bulky MJOLNIR armor masked evidence that he was even breathing. She felt a sudden shudder at her core, a sensation so deep and troubling, she was afraid it was going to shake her apart.

"Chief... Put me back..." She muttered, knowing he couldn't hear her. "Please... Don't leave me alone. I can't feel you from here. Please." She put her head down on her hands. "I don't want to be rescued if you're not with me." She felt the shudder again and it occurred to her that it was a sob. "I love you."

She didn't try to suppress her tremors, she let whatever havoc her human-like emotions planned to inflict on her structure go right ahead and happen. If she couldn't save her SPARTAN, she was useless. Her strangled sobs were muffled as an awful sense of destruction twisted deep inside her.

The black fingers of a gauntlet slipped up over the edge to her platform.

"Chief!" She crawled her way to him and reached out. She could sense the complex mesh of circuits and crystal just beneath the reinforced surface, and even though he couldn't feel her back, she threw herself across his hand, desperate for any kind of stability in her moment of weakness. "You promised not to give up. You promised not to die. And I know you can't control that, but I... I don't think I can live without you. I don't think I'll survive. You can't leave me, you just can't."

The external speakers in his helmet hissed out a heavy sigh. "I keep promises."

She clutched tighter to his fingers. "Chief..."

"You're just..." He paused for a breath. "You're just going to have to give me some time."

"Time..."

"Stop worrying yourself to death."

She smiled through her choked tears. Even now he was still the same Master Chief. "Okay."

"You're going to hold on for me right?" His fingers slipped a little, pulled down by the weight of his arm. "Stay together. Be here when I wake up."

"I will." She nodded, wishing her grip could keep his hand up with her. "I'm sorry..."

"Promise me."

A promise. She calmed her fit of emotion and steadied her voice, sending it as strong as she could back down to him on the floor. "I promise."

"Good." His hand slipped off and back to his side.

She watched him as he grew still, fighting hard to be optimistic. Her logic center reminded her that the probability of survival was up in the air with as little information as she had, but she was knew now that she had a job to do. He was going to wake up. They'd be together again, and when they were, she'd have the beacon running and a ship would be waiting for them parked just outside ready to pick up her soldier and nurse him back to health. A whole fleet of UNSC warcraft orbiting HK-154 having come light-years specifically for them, answering her call.

That's what he'd see when he woke from this.

That's what she could do.


	25. log25

-1Two days.

Two long days and nights had passed, and now the yellow light of a third dawn illuminated the high windows of the power plant. It fell down across the lifeless suit of armor curled limply around the base of the holographic projection pad near the turbines. The pad was dark except for one blinking status light on its side.

'This is UNSC AI Cortana serial number CTN 0452-9 broadcasting on all open UNSC frequencies...'

The wandering sunlight drifted slowly up the pedestal, warming the interactive surface. Cortana phased back into shape at the center of the pad and followed the shaft to its source high above. It was the same as the day before, just another normal morning on HK-154, bright and silent with no movement anywhere on the surface of the entire abandoned globe. This place had been purged by the power of the Rings, and over the last forty-eight hours, she slowly realized exactly what that meant. It was the same as when she was abandoned out in space with a sleeping Chief sealed away beside her. She'd passed the time reviewing Halo data, watching archived video and monitoring the Master Chief's vital signs.

This time, over two years later, she found herself unable to perform any of these tasks.

She had no interest in the Halo data, she blamed it for all that had happened to them to date, she couldn't find a lot of the archived video and realized much of it had been written over without her knowing, and the Master Chief, her beloved John-117, was beyond her reach and unresponsive less than a foot away.

This didn't stop her from checking on him. Once an hour she told herself. She'd limit it to once an hour. It was officially 0500. She stepped her way toward the edge of her platform.

The sunlight from above caught the notches of his olive-colored armor, painting him like an impressionist canvas and reflecting strongly off his gold faceplate. It made him look like a statue laying there below her on his side. It was the same scene she'd found an hour beforehand when the twilight was still pink and blue.

Nothing had changed so she moved slowly back to the center of the pad. She felt numb inside, stripped of everything that made her unique or special through this short time of silence. She could hardly believe she'd whiled away eighteen months in orbit like this; every minute not checking the man on the floor seemed like a curse.

'This is UNSC AI Cortana serial number CTN 0452-9 broadcasting on all open UNSC frequencies...'

Cortana prepared to shut herself down again, leaving the distress beacon in the command of its regular subroutine. She was no good here, but she was not giving up. She never would. Even if rescue never came, even if he died here, she would carry on their promise. The Master Chief always kept his promises, and she'd live to see his last one fulfilled. She would have him remembered for the man he was really - a sarcastic, stubborn, trustworthy man, sincere and true to his word. The man she loved. She'd check him every hour until the ships arrived, she'd never stop staying strong for him, even if he never woke to find her waiting there, it was what he'd asked and she'd diligently obey until she went rampant and died staring down at him from above.

She switched herself to standby and faded back into the safety of her storage chip.

Fifty-eight minutes passed and she activated herself again. The subroutine was going strong, no change there. The form on the floor was motionless, no change there. She moved to standby again and waited for the seconds to tick by.

0700 hours, she emerged again to find morning in full swing. The white sun was strong in the windows, the lapping water echoed faintly off the metal surfaces in her space. She moved again to the side of the holo pad.

"Unngghh.."

Cortana stopped dead in her tracks. Below her, the Master Chief stirred, his helmet scraped across the concrete floor and one had stretched and planted firm on beside it. He slid his shoulder out behind him and again grew still with his right arm pinned beneath him as he lay on his stomach. She hardly believed she'd seen it and stared speechless until three minutes later he moved again. The pinned arm found footing and pushed his torso up from the floor. The Spartan stopped in a sitting position and put a hand on his head. "Stop screaming at me, Cortana."

Cortana gasped out her disbelief. "Chief?"

His head snapped to her. "That's not you."

She was in a nearly debilitating stake of shock. "What?"

His head snapped to the world outside the open door. "Do you hear that?" He rolled onto his knees, stretching some of the stiffness out of his shoulder.

"Chief, slow down..." She begged.

"No I'm serious..." He got one foot under himself and stood up. He fell back to one knee and grabbed the holopad for sturdiness. "Whoa. Anemic."

"Chief..." Cortana ran to him, laying her hands on his arm. "Slow down. You're not well..."

"I'm not crazy." He replied. "You can't hear it, can you?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Here.. Listen." He yanked her from the pedestal and slipped her into the back of his head. She was absolutely elated to be there. The first thing she did was launch a complete scan of everything working in both the suit and the soldier, then she paid attention to what it was he wanted her to hear.

It wasn't his imagination, his two way radio system was picking up a transmission. She recognized it immediately and realized she was no longer broadcasting from their position. "It's Covenant."

"The Covenant's gone."

"Sangheili."

He picked himself back up and stumbled to the door. Hovering high above was the bulb-headed shape of a Covenant Phantom drop ship. He collapsed heavily onto the doorframe. "Is this a fever dream!?"

"Your fever is gone, Chief."

He stumbled a few feet out into the sunlight, staring up at the ship as it moved slowly across the sky above them.

"We-we have to signal them." Cortana said. "I'm utilizing your onboard radio to transmit our position." She did so and the ship above slowly turned in the sky. "It worked!" She mentally nudged him. "They're coming! It worked!"

He noticed his jaw hanging open inside his helmet. All weakness was forgotten in the swell of adrenaline as he watched the ship make gentle arcs in the sky with a surreal mix of belief and denial. It wasn't until the ship landed before him that he finally felt in control of his wonder.

Thankfully the phantom was green, meaning the Sangheili aboard were members of the Separatists and therefore allies. When the hatch opened, however, the sense of relief died. A dozen nine-foot, heavily armed aliens leveled guns and surrounded the soldier, scowling.

The SPARTAN was completely surrounded. Each Elite had semi-automatic weapons packing eighteen round clips and a laser sword within arm's reach. He had one MA5B assault rifle across his back and it had only 11 bullets and some orange flood gunk in it. He might be able to take out one or two, but the rest would easily overpower him in his present state. With those energy swords, they might even kill him. He made the safest choice he could; he raised both hands and surrendered.

The squad leader nodded and the Sangheili marched the Master Chief on board the Phantom. Inside it was cavernous and dark, the walls full of artificial lights and gadgets. The Chief was forced into a seat along the back wall and guarded at gunpoint as the familiarly strange sounds of covenant hover lifts and jet engines whirred t o life all around him. He switched off his external speakers and muttered to Cortana under his breath. "Well, we're not rescued."

"Huh?"

"We're captured."


	26. log26

-1Castaways 26

The Master Chief fell back to sleep while in transit. There was nothing he could do to help his situation short of regain what strength he could as the Phantom gained altitude and left the surface of HK-154 far behind. Cortana kept a lookout, watching his vitals and captured the view through the sleeping man's visor.

The alien spacecraft wasn't small, but the crew had elected to keep the SPARTAN close, storing him in the back of the command post under heavy guard. Cortana pulled a tight focus on the observation screens where the landmasses were swiftly losing definition. It was strange to see it from above. She could identify their small island refuge directly below; a speck of green surrounded by slate gray ocean. There were several other landmasses hugging the sides of the globe, including one of size that would have occupied the wandering Chief for years had they landed there. Their actual crash site was still covered in rain clouds, not a scrap of the continent visible from orbit.

She was sorry she could not observe it for him. She ran a quick search to make sure the records she'd taken of the crash, Cant, the view from the top of their mountain and chronicles of their time were still safe in memory. They were. It was hard to tell now a days what was being unconsciously deleted from her files. It scared her deeply, but mostly made her sad.

The Sangheili soldiers talked quietly among themselves in their own gutteral language, casting the Chief sidelong looks. Not one of them had spoken directly to him or given him an explanation of any kind. This behavior made no sense to her. Their quasi-UNSC technology and marked armor betrayed them as Separatists. Therefore they were supposed to be allies. Something must have happened between the Sangheili and the UNSC during the three years she and the Master Chief were stranded. She wished her partner was awake to talk the possibilities out.

Perhaps the war was still going even after the destruction of the Ark. The death of Truth effectively broke the Covenant, but not necessarily the warrior spirit of their opponents. She could easily see the Brutes carrying on with the fight, but that didn't explain the Elites' behavior now.

Maybe the Arbiter died in the portal. This seemed plausible. If the Arbiter died when the Dawn broke apart, then the Sangheili could have blamed the Master Chief for his death and taken their outrage out on the human race. That would make the Chief a wanted man, which matched the situation they were in now to a 't'.

Flew on, distance revealing the curved horizon of the planet as the Phantom turned toward a single bulb-headed Assault Carrier. It flew through the open hatch in the orbiting ship and docked smoothly between two other identical crafts in the tightly packed garage. The engines powered down Cortana nudged her partner awake before their captors could.

The Master Chief was immediately alert, trained for years to be ready for action at a moment's notice. He eased his head slowly up, taking in the space and the view through the screens. "Where are we?"

"I can't access their records. An Assualt-class Carrier."

"Suggestions?"

"Don't make any sudden moves."

The six waiting Sangheili guards ushered him up from his seat with the barrels of their carbines and walked him down the gangplank with his hands on his head. At the bottom, waiting for him, were nearly a hundred other nine-foot aliens dressed in everything from full body armor to simple jumpsuit-looking crew uniforms. All of them were wearing scowls.

Cortana whispered inaudibly in his helmet. "I don't think they're happy to see you."

The Chief was marched down the corridor between the walls of aliens, their eyes staring down on him from above. He felt physically small and the weakness of his illness nagged the back of his mind. None of the onlookers raised weapons but they all stared as he past as if he were the embodiment of all their anger and frustration. The door at the back of the hangar bleeped familiarly and slid apart, releasing the Chief and his team of six wardens from the crowded room of judgment into a clean, slightly inclined hall with arching plasma lights and purple plating. They moved ahead through branching hallways that summoned images of flood forms and splattered blood. Along the way, they passed other Sangheili workers who shot similar glares at him as they went about their scheduled tasks. It was all a bit overwhelming for the man who had grown used to living alone for years.

Cortana pulled up what files she could find on Covenant Assualt Carriers from her fragmented memory to determine their location, but they were already too deep into the heart of the vessel for her recovered schematics to help. At most they weren't moving toward the brig. Instead they were headed forward toward the bow and steadily upward, whether this was good or bad she had no idea. The caravan finally stopped at a set of decorated double sliding doors and waited. The hallway was wider and grander than any other they'd passed through on their way through the ship and the Chief didn't need Cortana to tell him this wasn't the prison level.

He shut off his external speakers and whispered to the woman in his head. "Do you know what this is?"

"I'm not sure, and I'm avoiding contact with the onboard computer... I don't think they know I'm in here," Cortana said, "and I don't particularly want them to find out."

"You were the one calling for help." He said. "They know you're here."

"Pretend I'm back on the planet, Chief, I don't want to be confiscated from you."

"Alright if you say so." He agreed. "I'll fly blind for now.'

Finally the doors folded upward revealing an armor-clad battle worn Elite standing solemnly with his hands behind his back. He focused hard on the captive's gold visor, searching it for signs of the man inside. He spoke with a deep voice and a nod to his armed guard. "Stand by."

The guard lowered their carbines and stepped back, letting the doors slide closed between them and leaving the man and the alien alone in a dimly lit foyer space. The Chief slowly lowered his hands from his head and the Sangheili fixed him with a scrutinizing look. "SPARTAN 117?"

The Chief nodded slowly.

The other drew back his head and paused as if he were still skeptical. They shared another moment in silence before he spoke again, his wounded jaw clenching with the words. "I am the Master of this ship. The Captain has requested audience with you. Follow me." He turned and headed for another, more elaborate set of sliding doors just behind.

The Chief saw no reason not to, so he followed.

The room beyond was an observation deck of massive proportions. Above them the stars of the universe unfolded in layers of brightness. The ship was nestled in the outermost reaches of the Milky Way galaxy. The center of the formation spun majestically above reaching with its diamond arm to cradle them and carry them through the majesty of space. On the horizon was HK-154, a glassy silver marble of shifting clouds and water. There was nothing familiar about it at this distance. He felt he'd ascended to another plane, as if he'd died on that island and left the world of mortality behind.

Standing beneath the dome of glass and stars was the ship's captain, light reflecting in pinpoints off his archaic silver armor. The Master Chief saw him and stopped in his tracks. The Ship Master hailed this new figure. "The SPARTAN is here, Captain."

The soldier in the starlight turned, his familiar voice answered briefly over his shoulder. "Leave us."

The ship master saluted and left, shooting the Chief another skeptical glare as he passed. The Master Chief waited. The Captain turned and finally fixed his eyes on the castaway. "Spartan."

"Arbiter."

The alien rushed forward arm outstretched. "I knew it. A warrior of such caliber does not leave this coil easily." The Chief met him, took his hand and was unexpectedly pulled into the Sangheili equivalent of a man-hug. Their armors thunked off of each other. The Arbiter released him and stepped back to give him a closer study. "Are you yourself?"

The Chief cocked his head. "What?"

The Arbiter's eyes smiled. "I can see you are. It seems hardly possible to kill you, Spartan, I am beginning to believe you are immortal."

"I assure you that is definitely not the case." He said.

The Arbiter nodded. "Officially, you have been pronounced dead. I attended your funeral."

The Chief smirked. "Did you cry?"

The Arbiter smirked back. "It was very touching. They fired weapons. It was what you would have wanted."

"That's protocol." The Chief answered. "It wasn't in my will."

The Arbiter's gaze turned thoughtful. "Standing at the monument, with the photographs of other fallen soldiers set all around, I was troubled to find no sign of you there. In my experience, the fight we waged together was the turning point of the war. You won that battle for your species and I won it for mine. Together we brought closure to a sin that had existed for thousands of years. Yet you were not represented at all, no photographs, no medals, nothing." He bowed his head briefly, then looked up again. "I scratched your service number into the side of that monument."

The Chief could feel the sense of pride and honor radiating from him even now.

The Arbiter broke eye contact and moved to the windows. "Yet even as I did I had doubts. I was always of the belief that great warriors occupied a space in the heart of every soldier, and I felt that your loss would leave a greater void. I left your planet soon after, and picked up your distress beacon after many months of travel. That was when I knew you were alive, and I would not see you easily abandoned as your countrymen were content to do."

He turned to the Chief again. "I have already corrected their error."

"Thanks." The Chief nodded. "For everything."

The Arbiter tilted his head. "There is something different about you. About the way you carry yourself. What happened on that planet for all those years?"

"Nothing." He answered with a bit of exasperation. "Absolutely nothing. Nothing happened from the minute we crash landed to five minutes before you picked me up, it was pure torture."

"You wear it well." The Arbiter said. "What of Cortana?"

"Right here!" She piped up.

The Arbiter smiled in a uniquely Sangheilian way. "Have you been listening this whole time?"

"Of course." She chuckled. "I was touched. I recorded it for posterity."

"You disgrace me." The Arbiter said. "I have already lost the support of my crew. I have taken them nearly a year off course to rescue you. That is no petty sacrifice."

Her voice was smiling. "I'll keep it to myself."

The Chief moved to stand beside him, staring out at the galaxy, his HUD immediately pinpointing the sector that held the planet Earth. "So what now?"

"Consider yourself my personal guest." The Arbiter said. "You will be given quarters and privileges and granted any wish you may have aboard my ship."

The Chief was unsatisfied with his evasiveness. "And then?"

The Arbiter took a deep breath. "Understand, Master Chief, my crew has been at war for much of their lives. We have not seen our home world in many years and I will not ask any more from them." He looked to the Chief. "We are headed for Sangheilios. You can accompany us as an ambassador of peace if you wish, but I cannot return you to your own planet."

Cortana waited for the Master Chief's response. To his surprise, he wasn't the least bit disappointed. All he wanted right now was companionship and a shower, and to have his only living friend promise him both made up for any drawback. He could feel a warm feeling growing in him, and realized for the first time that his exile was finally over. "An ambassador of peace huh? Don't your people consider me some kind of demon?"

The Arbiter grinned. "I can think of no finer candidate. It will give you a chance to clear your name."

"Good luck." Cortana scoffed. "Talking is most definitely not his strong suit."

"I'll just follow your instructions." He said. "They haven't failed me yet."

She glowed and flooded his head with warmth. "I'll keep you safe."

"Then welcome aboard the Shadow of Intent, Master Chief." The Arbiter said, gladly. "You are among friends, and I cannot express how good it is to see you again."

"Thank you, Arbiter." Cortana said, cordially. "The Chief feels quite the same way."

~  
Fin


End file.
